Hello internet,

It’s been a while since we last released any changes to our little website as we were diverted to something else for a while.  That’s not to say we haven’t also been busying away with your favourite 5-a-side organiser!

So what’s changed this time in this version?

Social Networks

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally added better integration for social networking websites.  If you have a twitter, facebook or google account you may find it easier to login using your social account.  Simply visit the new Social Network tab in Your Profile and click the Change accounts button at the bottom.

From the resulting dialog you can link your social network account, and change your avatar (or pick one of ours :-).

Invitation Improvements

We’ve overhauled the process for inviting your mates to join your games as there have been problems with this in the past.  From now we’re using a simple invitation code.  Anyone wishing to join your game will still require authorisation by game managers.  You can also post to twitter and facebook through the Squad Invitation screen (click on the “Invite someone to join your squad” from the new Squad dashboard).

Note this works best if you have a public game, as then we can post a direct link for people to join.  For private games people will have to ask for an invitation.

Timetable Improvements

We’ve also made the improvements to the game timetable screen.

It’s now much easier to see the relationship between all your reminders, and how they work together.  Hopefully this is a little more intuitive.

Diary View

The match dashboard has also had a bit of makeover.  We’ve always felt this does a good job at showing quite a lot of information, however it was possible to get a little lost with which match was which.  This is particularly true if you play a couple of times a week.

To improve things just a little we’ve added a diary on the dashboard so you can see at a glance all the matches you have coming up.

Navigation Changes

Another in the small but useful changes pot is we’ve added a new menu link to your squads.

This provides a convenient way to invite new players, create advertising posters, etc.

Fixes

• Average age of a team now shows to just two decimal places, rather than the massive number is was showing.
• As outlined, we’ve changed how the invitation system works as there have been problems with this in the past.  From now we’re using a simple invitation code.  Anyone wishing to join your game will still require authorisation by game managers.
• There was a problem with the Your Profile screen which resulted in changes to the Updates? and Other parties? flags not saving correctly.  As a safety precaution we’ve made everyone’s flags to Off as we can’t be certain if anyone has turned these flags On or Off. 
• A whole bunch of other small stuff we won’t bore you with J.

Do you like the changes we’ve made?  Have you got a better way to improve the site?  We'd love to hear from you ...

Until next time.
Team TP.

Good Friday, following by Easter Monday, yeah!  

But if you're match falls around this time, you might want to think about tweeking when you invites and reminders go out.

http://toepoke.co.uk/permalink.aspx#future-tab

Just click this little icon on your match to change when your reminders go out.

Hi all,

We have been informed by our webhost that they need to apply the latest software updates on their servers.

As a result toepoke will be unavailable between the hours of 10pm and 11pm on Monday, 5^th of March 2012.

Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind regards,
Team TP!

As some of you might be aware we recently released the Fluqi library as open source.  I won’t repeat the ins-and-outs, but suffice to say Fluqi is a set of helper classes for building websites using the excellent jQuery UI widgets in a fluent manner.

We built Fluqi because we were tired of typing out the same HTML mark-up on lots of pages to achieve a similar objective.  We’ve been making changes to toepoke throughout the development of Fluqi as a dogfooding exercise and thought we’d share some of that experience.

For instance we have a screen showing matches that are coming in the future, and whether the user has said they’re playing or not.  With JavaScript active the user sees this:

As you can see, the screenshot shows a tab widget with an accordion widget inside each tab.  toepoke was built from the ground up to be progressive so the site is still usable to people with JavaScript disabled.  So without JavaScript, the same screen looks like this:

It’s not very pretty, but it is still useable.

When developing Fluqi one thing we wanted to do was to be able to still have the look and feel of the jQuery UI widgets, even if JavaScript is disabled.  After implementing Fluqi on our own website we now use the following code to create the tab widget above (the accordion part is omitted for brevity):

                var tabs = Html.CreateTabs("tabs")
                                .Rendering
                                                .SetRenderCSS(true)
                                .Finish()
                ;

The important part here is SetRenderCSS(true).  This tells Fluqi to draw the CSS classes jQuery UI uses under the hood, which normally are added through JavaScript (but obviously don’t when JavaScript is disabled).  The result now looks like this:

As we can see, there’s quite an improvement.  The tab widget still looks like a tab, as do the accordion.  Naturally the tabs and accordion widgets won’t behave as such as JavaScript is off, but it’s a lot clearer to the user visually what’s going on.

Please note however that there are some areas of the jQuery UI website that advise not adding the CSS classes to your mark-up (which is what the SetRenderCSS(true) method does), however I haven’t found any problems in doing this so far.  So as always, test it before going into production J.

Good luck,
Team TP!

Hi,

Just a reminder that a week on Tuesday is Valentine’s day everyone.

If you play on a Tuesday night …. you might want to keep this in mind ;-)

Kind regards,

Team TP.

Hi all,

We’ve been informed by our hosting supplier that our site may be down between 10pm and 11pm on Tuesday 7^th February 2012 to apply software updates.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

Team TP.

Hi everyone,

It's that time of year again. The countdown to finishing work and having a few days (or weeks if you're lucky) off before the new year. The work Christmas parties are starting and the numbers for football are getting low.

In our ongoing goal to remove the faff you should always have 2 weeks of games ongoing at at one time. You will also have a little cancel game button on each match.

So if your pitch is shutting down for Christmas, just cancel your games and have a couple of weeks off. Put your feet up, eat too much and watch too much telly.

Have a good Christmas and New Year everyone!

Wow it's been a few months since we last blogged about a new build! You may not have noticed, but we having been pushing a few changes out. So in case you've missed them here's the details ...

Timetable changes

If you've not changed your reminders timetable lately you might remember it looking like this:

From a functional perspective it does the job, but let's face it ... it's never been the prettiest of things to look at!

Well as you can see we made a few changes on this screen. It still does everything it used to do, but now it doesn't hurt your eyes to look at it!

We think a lot of the core functionality is in place for the website and it's time to pretty things up a little. Disagree? what else would you like to see?

Getting the message across

If you read the tell me more section of the website we'd be surprised if you signed up ... it was awful! We've given that a big overhall and hope it gets the message across better. Why not have a look and let us know if it hits the spot?

Side picker enhancements

Find it hard picking sides? Your mates giving you stick because it all looks one-sided? Whilst we're trying to build the best 5-a-sside football organiser in the UK we're no experts on getting the sides fair either .

We've got more than a few ideas on how to make this a easier. This one's just the first. From today if you click on the team name we'll show you the average age of the players on that team. Not much, but it's a start!

Also when you click on a player, their age will appear in the profile too, so at least we can now use age as a guide when picking the sides. Not that age is the perfect indication - after all I'm as rubbish at football now as was when I was 15!

Fixes

• Cancelled matches were still being shown ... even after 6 months! These now disappear after the match [would] have finished.

• The Updates check box wouldn't save when it was changed.

  Our sincere apologies for this and humbly request you to check you are happy with your settings. We intend to start e-mailing updates in the near future and wouldn't want you to get a message you didn't want.

• Fixed a broken link in the e-mail you get when you're accepted into a game.

• Some small text changes to improve readability.

• Fixed annoying bug which would send an e-mail to the managers saying someone had dropped out of the match after the deadline. When in fact all they'd said was they weren't playing.

  Managers will no longer get this message, but they'll still get an e-mail if a player has genuinely dropped out of the match.

• When viewing the side picker screen, players would see everyone listed according to when they put their names down to play. Players will now see these listed alphabetically; Managers will still see them ordered by the time players put their name down.

• We've fixed annoying bug number 2 where the wrong number would come out in one of the e-mails which made it look like you always had enough players, when in fact this was a complete lie .

• Fixed an issue with the sign-up process which prevented new users joining a squad in certain scenarios.

• Fixed issue when clicking a link in one of the e-mails multiple times.

• Fixed lots and lots of little problems we won't bore you with !

Until next time.
Team TP.

Hi,

Just a small build this month, enjoy!

Advertise your match

Got a noticeboard at work? Why not ask to put up a poster advertising your game to other people, and use the toepoke poster builder!

New icon on the game menu:

And you get a new screen where you can download a poster you can print out.

Fixes and Features

• As promised the game screen now shows your unique game number (so you can tell your mates to use toepoke.co.uk/xyz.aspx to sign-up).
• Players who have just signed up are now told they might be places available for the next game (as they may have been too late for the normal invitation e-mail).
• Tweaked the faq screens so they're a bit easier to use, and arguably a little prettier.

Until next time.
Team TP.