Boyzoid's Blog & Stuff

...and I do not hate it.

Let me give you some back story. I have been in a golf league for the last few years. The first year, all the points totals and standings were done on an Excel spreadsheet, and it was a rare occasion when we knew the standings before we played our matches each week. The last 2 years we have used an online service that was nice, but it was difficult to fit our scoring rules into the site and while we had access to the stats and standings, they were often inaccurate

This year, I was asked by the guy who runs the league to see if there was anything I could find that might work. Most of the services I found that would work were cost prohibitive, and the ones that were free did not fulfill our needs. I briefly thought about writing something from scratch, but with school and work, there is no way I could have gotten it done in time..even when using ColdFusion. That is when I started looking into WordPress.

Say what you will about PHP, but WordPress is a simply amazing platform (for lack of a better word). In about 2 hours time, I had the site set up, with a new theme and had located plugins that would allow us to track everything we needed for the league - Yes, I actually found a plugin for tracking sports leagues.

It took some getting used to how the code 'flows' when dealing with plugins, but once I (kind of) figured it out, it was pretty easy to make some customizations - such as tweaking or adding 'templates' for displaying the standings or team information, as well as modifying some of the functions that extract the data from the database. Admittedly, though, a lot of what I was doing was utilizing WordPress functionality (as opposed to native PHP functionality). So far, I have only received positive feedback from other league members, but, I expect that to change when league play actually starts up.

Now, don't get worried, I am not going to 'jump ship'. I am not giving up ColdFusion, but it was kind of nice to play around with PHP again (I actually started as a PHP developer before I 'discovered' ColdFusion)

There are some other customizations that I plan to implement over the next month or so that might require me to dig a little deeper and if its anything I think might be worth sharing, I will post it.