The Creation of Teams

The last time that we spoke, we talked about how the create team and groups interface will be working. Well we’ve now got some more updates to share with you.

Right now you’re presented with a list of golf players that come either from your friends list or from being associated with a specific golf course. The player list lets you toggle this choice, lets you sort by username, first name and last name. There is also a search box where you type in the name that you’re looking for and all matching players will be displayed. Now when you’re ready to add a player to a team, you need only click one of the four buttons displayed which correspond to the matching teams.

Team Listing

Now you have your players added to the teams that you want them to play on, but you have one extra player who just happens to not be a GolfStakes.com member. Not a problem. You click the green and white plus sign which says “One Time Player” and you will be given a dialog box like the following:

From this dialog box you can create a temporary one time player that will be scored and tracked inside of the tournament and any rounds that associated with a tournament.

In Summary

Well that’s all we’ve got for now. Took a lot of work to get this polished and working. Not on the list is getting the teams made into groups.

Team and Group Management

The last couple of weeks have been spent building the Teams and Groups section of the Tournament interface. This page is going to be a heavy hitting action page. Take a look at the following screen shot.

Options

Right off the bat you’re going to have options to select creating a team or creating a group. This way you can setup your tournaments the way you want to play them. Next you can see a player list search box. Just typing anything into this text area will filter the player list down to the specific item you’re looking for.

The dropdown list is used to load the player list. Right now you can select players either by your friends list, or by the course that you have selected to play your tournament on.

Once the grid has been loaded, you can now scroll the rows up and down depending on how large a list you have, you can also sort the grid by username, first name and last name. When you’ve found the player you would like to add to the tournament, click on one of the four buttons displayed, and the player will then be moved over to the correct team list.

Currently the team list is just a working example which is displaying the user ID . When the grid is completed you will be able to see all information that you currently see on the rounds page for individual play. Take a look at this screen shot for an example of the information.

Now this information will not be editable on the grid itself. We’re planning on having a pop out edit form to make it easier for you.

Conclusion

Okay, so we’ve walked through the top section. We’re still working on the details of the team list grids and how we’re going to make the groups. But as you can see, we’ve done a lot so far an there is a ton more work to do.

Hope you like the direction we’re going with this, and as always we’re open to any comments that you have about the site.

Tournament Management

We’ve now completed the two of the first steps for creating and managing a tournament. As you saw from our preview a few weeks ago the main page is setup to have a grid listing out your tournaments, a section below that that lists out your tournament administrators and a nice call to action button on the right side that will take you into the tournament creation wizard. See the screen shot below for a view of the new layout for the main page.

Tournament List Grid

The grid that you see is now a nice paging and sorting grid. You can sort through your tournaments on the first three columns. At the bottom of the page you can see that there is now paging added. As you go over ten tournaments the grid will now start to add pages to shift through rather than one big long list.

Tournament Administrator List

The administrator list found under the grid will show the name, the last they that person was one and few action links. As you add administrators to your tournaments you will see a default of three people here and a scroll bar to roll through the rest.

Create / Edit Tournament Screen

Our general information tab for tournaments has grown some since we’ve last talked about it. As you can see from the screen shot below we’ve added quite a few items and features to the page.

General Tournament Information

Right now in the upper section of the page you can see that we have all of the necessary items to create a tournament along with start and end dates, sponsor information, fees and a description. Validation has been added to this page to insure that you have enter the very basic information for a tournament. The required fields are: tournament name, course and tee.

Tournament Rounds

Creating a tournament is more than just having the time and place. With GolfStakes.com you also have the ability to add rounds to your tournament when you creating the tournament. After filling in the required fields above, you only need to give the round a name, the date it will be played in your tournament, if you would like GolfStakes.com to give you summary screens in between holes and which holes you will be playing. Click “Add Round to Tournament” and the grid below will reload and show you new tournament. Clicking on course name will take you to the actual round page, and clicking remove will take this round out of the tournament.

All message of success, information and errors will show up where the red box is with an appropriate color scheme.

Summary

That’s it for now. We hope you like what you see here and are looking forward to creating your next tournament with GolfStakes.com. As always any comments or feedback is greatly welcomed.

Feedback Driven Upgrades

A few months ago we unveiled our new tournament management interface and we also used it in a large tournament as a real test of where we were going. Well we found that we were a little off on some things.

We found that the interface was a little hard to use for more than just a few players (the tournament had 150+ players in it) and adding in players one a time turned out to be a test of patience. Setting up the tournament groups and flights took too long and had many involved steps to complete the action. And we had no way of sharing the tournament with other tournament administrators.

Our Changes

So we’ve gone back to the drawing board and we’re making some changes to the interface. First we’re going to the make the tournament home page a little bit more informative.

Here’s what is going to happen. The home page of the tournament management screen is now going to have a grid with your current tournaments displayed. This will link to a tabbed interface where you can go through and change whatever values need to be adjusted.

Second, you’re going to see a really large button that will take you in a new tournament setup wizard. Creating a tournament just didn’t stand out and now we’re going to highlight this feature.

On the bottom half of this screen you can see your tournament administrators. From here you can communicate with these people, view their profiles and whatnot. To the side you’ll see a link where you can add a new administrator. Clicking this link will take you to a screen much like this one:

Type in an email or a username, find the person whom you’d like to have as administrator of your tournaments and click the action of “Add as Admin”. You’ll now be redirected back to the tournament management home page and your new administrator will be displayed on the page.

Basic Info

Okay, we’ve go the home page redesigned and now we’re going to take a look at the new tabbed interface and how we’re going to build up a tournament.

Here’s the basic setup page. Also known as the first step of the tournament setup wizard. As you can see their are tabs staggered across the top of the wizard. When you’re first creating a tournament these we only activate after creating the general information of a tournament. When you’re editing a tournament each tab will be active and you will be able to dive in and adjust any information necessary.

The general information section is just that. You’re going to set the who, what, when, where parts of tournament. Once you choose the where (your course) you will also have the opportunity to create predefined rounds for this tournament.

Wrap Up

That’s all we’ve got now. Everything is up in the air over how we’re creating this functionality but we’re really working to make it easier on you, the user of GolfStakes.com. Come back again and we should have more information on the remaining tabs of this great new feature of GolfStakes.com.

Quick Tournament Overview

Adding in tournaments turned out to be a huge undertaking which involved a few months of hard work. Starting on August 6th GolfStakes.com is going for a live action test of the new features. To give you a taste of what it takes to setup and manage a tournament here is a quick overview.

The Setup

To create a tournament is pretty simple. The only items that you need is a name for the tournament, when it's being played, where it's going to be played at, a starting tee (the options come from the course that you select) and if this is a private tournament and if you will be using the 3-5 rule from the USGA handbook.

Once you create the tournament you can now add players to your tournament.

Simply search for the GolfStakes.com member whom you would like add to your tournament, select if they are a member or a guest and then add them to your player list. What you're doing here is actually creating a bucket to ease the creation of teams and flights.

Creating a team is a simple matter of select which player will play against which player.

Once you have create players, teams and flights you can easily view the tournament details.

Everything is in the details

From the details screen you can drill down and see:

• player details
• details of the teams in tournament
• flight information for the tournament
• and how many rounds are associated with the tournament

The last step of creating a tournament is associating a round with the tournament. The only thing needed for this action is a round name. Once you associate a round, you can now go to the round list page, and see all of  your players grouped together in teams ready to add side games, scoring and printing of score cards.

Wrap up

That's  it for now. Tournaments are a pretty direct path when you're setting one up. Once you have them setup, going out to the course and scoring the tournament should be as simple as playing a normal round. So there you go, have fun and enjoy your next tournament while using GolfStakes.com.

The Duke Gibson Classic

Starting on August 6th, 7th and 8th, GolfStakes.com is going to be used to track and score our very first large scale tournament at the Blue Hills Country Club in Kansas City. The Duke Gibson Classic is an annual event and will for the very first time be scored in real time using GolfStakes.com's new tournament management features.

Player's scores will be tracked during the three day event with daily adjustments made automatically via the GolfStakes.com scoring engine. During each daily round, players and spectators will have the opportunity to watch the action on GolfStakes.com's live leader board.

After several long months of work, we here at GolfStakes.com are excited about bringing the power of GolfStakes.com to a large scale tournament. We look forward to letting you know how the event went and where we'll be going with the tournament management features.

One year with GolfStakes

With over a year of working with GolfStakes.com we've made a lot of major improvements. Three major facelifts of the user interface, the addition of a messaging system, profiles, statistics, 23 different types of side games, and the always upgraded scoring engine. We're looking ahead at some of the great new improvements in store for you.

Our first one is going to be the addition of tournaments. We're planning to roll out the ability to create teams, flights and tournaments integrated with the ability to manage all aspects of the game during a tournament.

The second major upgrade is going to be league setup and management. We know that a lot of you like to play on leagues and this has been a long term goal for us.

So we're doing some heads down coding and cranking out new additions to the site. Come visit GolfStakes.com and see what's new and exciting in the world of online golf scoring.