patches – OOTP Fantasy Leagues Blog

Road to 1.0: Patch #4 (0.6 beta) Update Announcement

August 26, 2011May 19, 2020
by jfox015

The Road to 1.0 is a series of articles chronicling the journey of this mod from conception to full 1.0 release.

Version 0.5 beta of the mod was a big release with lots of new big features and bug fixes. It also completed a number of open-ended functional items that were missing from the mod and even featured a couple of last-minute additions. It’s been a popular release that’s received lots of attention on the OOTP forums and has even started to bleed into discussions on online league boards as well.

As such, a number of bug fixes and a few new enhancements have led to the creation of a fourth patch release, version 0.6 beta. This version will be released Wednesday, August 31, 2011. Here’s a rundown of the changes coming in this release:

Member Manager Tool

New to the Admin Dashboard is a true admin interface to manage site membership. Who’s registered? Who’s active and waiting for activation? Whose accounts are locked? Site admin can manage these options as well as change users access permissions and roles and even add and remove them as well now. This was one of the biggest glaring omissions from the dashboard thus far and it is now finally a part of the site admin’s toolkit!

Messaging Updates

While site members gained the ability to submit public team requests in 0.5, there was no mechanism to send a message to the commissioner along with those team requests to help assure the commissioner actually accepted them. This has been fixed in 0.6 as a message field is now available and is passed along with the team request to the league commissioner via an alert email.

Another missing item was the ability of the commissioner to send a message back to the requester when denying a team request. The commissioner must now enter a message when denying team requests.

Speaking of messaging with the commissioner, a new button has been added to league home pages allowing users to send messages to the league commissioner. This allows users to get in touch with league GMs while maintaining the privacy and security of their email accounts.

A new callout has been added to the My Profile to alert team owners when a trade offer is pending for them. This is in addition to the emails sent for trade offers and the trade information boxes on the Team -> Trade page.

Draft Fixes

While the draft received a good amount of attention in 0.5, there were still a couple of lingering issues to tie up with this patch. These include:

An issue with running the draft timer that would foul up and corrupt the draft for all other leagues in the site
The draft summary email always displaying the draft results for round one in all summary round emails.
Draft start time issues across timezones. If a commissioner set the draft start to 9 pm in the eastern US time zone, but users were in California, they would not be able to start the draft on time. This has been fixed with the addition of timezone support to the mod.
The auto-draft would fail to head into the last round when Utility players were used on rosters.
Draft engine attempting to make picks beyond the number of actual draft picks when auto drafting.

Bug Fixes and new Upgrade Page

Numerous other bugs have been fixed across the board and a new patch upgrade page has been added to allow site admins to upgrade their site without having to log in or make database changes manually. This may be a permanent replacement for the current in-game upgrade workflow which does not work when global attributes are required by the Base Controller and User management workflow as they are in 0.6.

Wrapping Up

The mod has seen some significant changes this year and every release tightens up the last open issues and adds some important functionality. We’re so close to the final 1.0 release, it’s time to excited about playing some OOTP Fantasy Baseball!

Are you ready for OOTP Fantasy Baseball?

The FINAL 1.0 release of the mod is coming Monday, September 12, 2011. Start planning your league to be ready to go when the mod is released.

Get the mod today and start playing OOTP Fantasy baseball!

Download the latest stable release version from the official home page. All the documentation you need is right there with the included Administrators Guide. New for 0.5 is the Commissioners Guide which includes all the instructions necessary to run your fantasy leagues.

Give Feedback

Sound off on the forums. Head over to the OOTP Fantasy Leagues forums to let us know your thoughts on the mod. Interact with other users and let us know if you’re running an OOTP Fantasy League.

Want to contribute?

OOTP Fantasy Leagues is 100% free and open-source, and the source is publicly available on GitHub. Head over to the official Github page, fork it and send a pull request with your updates.

Want to help test?

Testing assures everything works as expected and that everyone gets the best fantasy experience possible. You can request to join the OOTP Fantasy Beta team. You’ll get access to join the beta demo season, access to the private development and beta testing topics on the mod forum, and exclusive access to features and changes BEFORE they become public. Use the official contact form to request to join the team today.

Development

Quick Change of Plans

January 10, 2011May 19, 2020
by jfox015

I planned to release 0.3 beta (patch #3) tomorrow morning, but I’ve had a quick last-minute shift in idea.

I have some overarching stuff I want to do with the mod (and more specifically to the CodeIgniter extensions that form the foundation of the mod), and I don’t want to keep putting off jumping into them.

So I plan to add two last enchantments to the mod, a league schedule editor (in progress), and a scoring period editor (requested by peba commissioner Corsairs). I feel these two additions will at least let online league owners run some fantasy season while the mod is in beta and I can then turn my focus from the mod and onto the larger items I want to hit.

In the short term, this is likely to irk a few folks who have trade support, rotisserie scoring support, and some of the other goodies on their must-have list. The long term benefit, however, to both the source code and the end-users are substantial for me to feel this is a justified move.

I’ll be making notes of and discussing the progress of this shift in direction over the coming months. As for patch #3, I’m hoping I could have a version out by Wednesday or Thursday, but most likely another ten days from now. So stay tuned.

Development

Version 0.3 beta in development

January 5, 2011May 19, 2020
by jfox015

As we ring in the new year, I thought it high time to resurface of sorts and throw an update on the state of the Fantasy Leagues mod.

The Third Beta Update

OOTP Fantasy Leagues 0.3 beta is in progress and will be released in the first or second week of this month. It is aimed mainly at adding some administrative features to the site and includes some critical bug fixes and several enhancements thrown in for good measure as well. As with 0.1 and 0.2, this update will be available as either a patch or full install. I’ve run numerous test installs using both methods and have the majority of the kinks worked out.

I’m also planning for this to hopefully be one of the last releases under the “beta” program. The mod has been in beta since July, so I think it’s in a pretty stable state now. I hope to run one or two more beta seasons on my nabl.aeoliandigital.com web site in the next couple weeks and I expect and plan to patch and upgrade moving forward as well. I also know how the “beta” label can cause some people to want to wait to install and use it, so I want to try and remove that blocker and get it out to as many users as possible.

Bug Fixes

Peteg9699 identified a significant issue where loading a historic MLB leagues was causing problems when trying to view the player’s stats page and, more importantly, running a draft. This was because the stats engine was defaulting to using the current calendar year when fetching players stats and not using the year defined in the OOTP league table. The stats engine patch fixes this glitch and adds support for historic leagues now in place. A few additional issues on the team rosters page and the player’s profile have been resolved as well.

Installer Updates

One big area where issues have seemed to keep cropping up is within the installation process. Because this mod is based on CodeIgniter, it requires several core config files to be updated with the unique system properties and then written to the server during install. The way CodeIgniter is built, there’s just no way around this. Server script access is always a touchy area for non-technical web users, especially those using shared hosting where permissions are limited and information about what is write accessible and what is not can be scare. So I’ve tried to enhance the installer process to accommodate these issues.

The installer has previously tested whether directories were writable just before attempting to write the necessary data to the config files but after the database had been loaded up. Now, the installer tests before anything is committed to the database to help users of the mod tackle these issues before they get too far along in the process.

New Features

Well, I can’t release a new update without throwing in some new features as well, right? So in that spirit, there are several new additions to the site to go along with this release.

StatsLab Compatibility Mode

A new option has been added to the Global Setting screen to enable StatsLab Compatibility. This feature prevents conflicts between the two mods when they are both run out of the same MySQL upload folder or the same database. A change to the database connection script used to upload MySQL export data to the database is also included in this patch release.

Admin Dashboard

Editors to the dashboard for the Roster Limits and Scoring Rules
A live version check widget to assure the latest mod version
Google Analytics support, which can be enabled and account info set in the Global Settings page
Revised upgrade messaging and workflow

Global

Removed version information from the site footer for security purposes
Added site-wide breadcrumbs
Made minor authentication workflow changes
Added ability for admins or league commissioners to manually edit players roster assignments on the player profile page

Installer

Fixed error checking and improved error messaging and instructions to resolve issues
Added a database test script to confirm database permissions and access
Removed potential database conflicts with StatsLab

So that’s the high-level view. Again, more information is still forthcoming. Watch for the official release announcement and complete change list soon.

Next up, a look forward to patch #4 and some of the BIG things that will be coming up soon for the mod and the effect these will have on the overall direction of this and associated projects (oh yes, I said projects).

Development

Second Patch is in the works

October 3, 2010May 19, 2020
by jfox015

So were are at 0.1 beta release day +3 and a few glaring shortcomings have come up rather quickly. In addition to the missing tables bug found by Corsairs Wednesday which promoted a quick first patch to be released, I also found a couple of other minor cosmetic issues that I addressed.

I also found that as the mod gets updated, there is going to need to be a way for league owners to upgrade without having to replace all the league files and re-run the installer. So for the second patch, I am working on a system to update both the database with any changes needed as well as three of the core CodeIgniter config files that contain custom league data.

The process is pretty easy. I’m just replicating the same steps I take in the installer, just using *_upgrade.php files instead of *_install.php and using the information already in the global config files. Pretty easy as they’re all constants. The one pain is that to get this system installed and running is going to require anyone using 0.1 or 0.1.1 to make a manual change to their constants.php file. No biggie, though. It’s just a couple of lines.

Corsairs had a good suggestion for functionality regarding required database files and pointed out some bugs in the individual table loading page which will also be addressed.

I need to make sure this new upgrade process is going smoothly before patch #2 comes out, but it will likely be by or before Wednesday. So stay tuned.

Have you downloaded the mod and are giving it a try? Drop a note and let me know and give me your thoughts about it thus far.

Tag: patches

Road to 1.0: Patch #4 (0.6 beta) Update Announcement

Member Manager Tool

Messaging Updates

Draft Fixes

Bug Fixes and new Upgrade Page

Wrapping Up

Are you ready for OOTP Fantasy Baseball?

Get the mod today and start playing OOTP Fantasy baseball!

Give Feedback

Want to contribute?

Want to help test?

Quick Change of Plans

Version 0.3 beta in development

The Third Beta Update

Bug Fixes

Installer Updates

New Features

StatsLab Compatibility Mode

Admin Dashboard

Global

Installer

Second Patch is in the works