We are currently working on a new tool designed to help with the planning of schedules for an upcoming season.  This feature is called the "Weekly Template" and is already available to Global Schedulers within the Scheduling module.

 

The idea with the Weekly Template page is to provide a week-at-a-glance view of all home venues which will show all games and practice slots, as well as ice slots / field bookings, for each venue but without actually scheduling these things for specific dates.  Many schedulers do this process at the start of the year on paper, so we're just enabling it to happen online and adding a few other features along the way.

 

For example, the Weekly Template page already produces a Team-By-Team summary at the bottom showing any game slots and/or practice slots assigned to each team in the template.  Again, this is something that is usually done manually by schedulers and happens automatically using this tool.

 

To use the Weekly Template simply navigate to the page and use the available buttons to Add New... Item or Add New... Slot.  Those are currently the only two options available.  The "Item" option can be used to add either Game times or Practice times to the template.  The "Slot" option can be used to add ice slots / field bookings.  For each, instead of choosing a specific date you'll choose a day of the week.

 

For the "Item"s you have the option to specify the full name of the team (or teams) which the game / practice is earmarked for.  The reason we are using the name as text, rather than choosing from a list of teams, is to allow the Weekly Template to work across multiple seasons.  As long as the names of the teams stay fairly consistent, the Weekly Template page will be able to match the team names in the Items with the team names in an actual season.

 

In addition to adding individually, it's also possible to import Items and import Slots.  These are found in the Scheduling Module in the Import / Export -> Weekly Templates section.  Instructions for each are provided on the importing pages.

 

What's planned for this Weekly Template in the future is an ability to take the Template and "apply it to the actual schedule for a given date range".  The specifics of how that actually works is still in the air, but most likely this function will produce an importable excel file containing games / practices / slots to be imported into the existing pages of the scheduling module.  While that makes it a two-step process, it also allows for the manipulation of exclusions in the excel file prior to importing.

 

We'll also make it possible to export the contents of the Weekly Template itself for associations who have either alternating weekly schedules or multiple seasons within a calendar year.  Basically that would allow for the Weekly Template to be "backed up" to an excel file and then imported again later.

 

Please try out this new feature if you get a chance and let us know what you like / don't like about it!

 

Shaun