Well it’s finally here - the first major update for The FIRST Alliance (yeah that’s right, get excited!). TFA has gotten even simpler, cleaner, and faster to use! We’ve been working on this for quite some time, and besides a major facelift here’s the rundown of some other sick features TFA now has.
Accounts – you can now create a TFA account and follow specific teams and events! *
User Dashboard – Login and you’ll be greeted to an interactive dashboard that displays all the events and teams you follow
API Documentation – Interactive API documentation for developers
Social Media integration - Like, Tweet, or “Plus”? your favorite teams or events on Google+
Information Page Redesign – Might be boring but it’s important still. All our informational pages have been redesigned to improve readability.
New Digs! - Yeah I already mentioned this, but we’re super proud about how the site looks.
What’s Next?
We’re never satisfied with status quo, and even though we just pushed the most rad update any FRC stats portal has ever seen, we’re already thinking about how to make it better. Let me share a few ideas with you all.
User controls – change password, username, etc.
More radness – design and usability is important to us and we’re going to make the site even more bodacious than it already is
Webcast portal – yeah we know the other guys have it, but c’mon you all deserve better
Big shoutout to the community who’s been absolutely amazing since we launched a little less than a year ago! You guys are why we do this and we love the fact that you’ve been so involved with the project. YOU GUYS ROCK!
The user features are very beta and we expect bugs to be encountered before we work out all the kinks/implement new features. So please be patient and tell us about any problems you have.
Building off that, anyway you could get worked into frclinks.com? You guys have the leg up on TBA in a few areas (stats, indicating WLT per match…low on media, though), but I’ll probably still always end up at TBA if you don’t have an frclink.
Also, does this only have the 2012 season? Will you always only have the current season or will it archive? Any chance of pre-2012 eventually?
This one’s out there, but what’re the chances of ever combing the Twitter feed and getting score breakdowns? And going to specific OPRs from there? :o
Farther out there - you know how TBA lets you search CD media, threads, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr? Could you do something like that, but maybe preview the results on the team page? I’m envisioning more of those pop-open frames that would show (by year?) thread titles with the team in it and the first couple CD photos, YouTube and Flickr hits, and Tweets. I have zero idea how difficult that is. (You’ll notice that my perfect world is basically defined as having TBA, CD, FRC-Spy, Simbotics Scouting, and Ed Law’s database cooperate into a single place…)
Promise the last ones are easy: is there are reason you don’t show the official team name? Also, having the links red makes them seem like they’re broken. (At least, to people whose website are Wikis.)
Building off that, anyway you could get worked into frclinks.com? You guys have the leg up on TBA in a few areas (stats, indicating WLT per match…low on media, though), but I’ll probably still always end up at TBA if you don’t have an frclink.
I just sent an email to the admin of frclinks asking about the possibility of integration with their system.
Also, does this only have the 2012 season? Will you always only have the current season or will it archive? Any chance of pre-2012 eventually?
We are planning on archiving. As far as pre-2012, we looked at that but most of the data is not there to complete the database, but we may do further research when we have more time.
This one’s out there, but what’re the chances of ever combing the Twitter feed and getting score breakdowns? And going to specific OPRs from there? :o
By doing score breakdowns do you mean by team? The twitter feed doesn’t seem to have much more data than what FRC’s website does short of giving penalties.
Farther out there - you know how TBA lets you search CD media, threads, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr? Could you do something like that, but maybe preview the results on the team page? I’m envisioning more of those pop-open frames that would show (by year?) thread titles with the team in it and the first couple CD photos, YouTube and Flickr hits, and Tweets. I have zero idea how difficult that is. (You’ll notice that my perfect world is basically defined as having TBA, CD, FRC-Spy, Simbotics Scouting, and Ed Law’s database cooperate into a single place…)
That’s a pretty good idea, I’ll talk to grant about that one.
Promise the last ones are easy: is there are reason you don’t show the official team name? Also, having the links red makes them seem like they’re broken. (At least, to people whose website are Wikis.)
What do you mean by not showing the official name?
I agree on the link color, we might revert back to blue links.
It varies slightly by year, but for instance it currently shows, hybrid, teleop, bridge and fouls for each match: FRC-Spy. This also allows you to calculate things like OPR-Bridge, OPR-Hybrid, etc. It’s identical to standard OPR/DPR stats (notwithstanding Coop adjustment), but using the component scores. Ed Law does this on each event page this year starting in column AA. Unfortunately the Twitter data isn’t complete, but it can be pretty cool (as nice as OPR in general) for where there is data.
According to FIRST, the “sponsor” name is the real team name. For instance, TBA shows 1640’s real name “The Boeing Company/UTC Sikorsky/Waterloo Gardens Inc./Arkema Inc./American Society of Mechanical Engineers & Downingtown Area Robotics Inc”. It’s kinda nice because you can see who sponsors a team and also search by sponsors (see all Boeing-related teams, for instance). It’s no big deal really, just curious.
With respect to the sponsor name, we just made the design decision not to show that information. Who knows we might integrate that information into the site some time in the future, just now we don’t see any advantage of showing it. Maybe implementing a sponsor search like you said would justify it. That’s a pretty good idea actually!
It’s no big deal. There’s definitely way cooler ideas on this thread; I was just curious if you’d thought of it and what the rationale was. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve used it, though then again if this really is going to become “the” go-to place for FIRST data, sponsors might appreciate being mentioned in connection to their team somehow (i.e. probably a bigger deal for the sponsors than the team members, when the site gets to that level).
Would it be possible to set up a multi-team search where you could, for example, enter two different team numbers and get a listing/results of every match they played with and/or against each other (across multiple seasons & events)?
So during a few beverages and a slow internet connection, I accidentally posted this in the wrong thread. Reposting here:
TBA is open-sourced on Github, so it would have been nice to see this as a contribution, but then I noticed you’ve written yours in PHP. Regardless, this looks really great. I’m glad Bootstrap is making its rounds throughout the internet, haha.
A side-note: Unless I’m mistaken, you don’t have bootstrap-responsive.min.css implemented (and I think there’s a JS file that goes with it). Might want to look into that.
Yea, currently on the work docket is mobile phone support and added user features. However for mobile version we may choose to go with a complete separate mobile website due to some pages having too much data/javascript than would be preferred on a mobile phone, but Grant and I will be discussing that choice soon.
