Playaz,
1). Any time you manually make changes to core code you’ll lose them if that core code is changed. As a developer that uses other developers plugins, modules, etc., I can tell you first hand that it’s great to be able to tweak things to work the way you want it, but it’s sometimes a nightmare to sync up those changes with core code changes. The best way to avoid the problem? Good question, but here are some ideas:
a). If you’ve modified templates, put your files in your theme folder inside a ‘leaguemanager’ folder. The plugin will look in there first for your template, if it finds it, that’s what it will use, if not, it uses the template in the ‘templates’ folder in the ‘leaguemanager’ plugin folder.
b). Back everything up, often. I can’t stress this enough. If you’ve put a mod on a core file (any file inside the leaguemanager folder) make sure you’ve got it backed up, in more than one location and if it’s really important, on more than one computer (or a cloud-based service like Dropbox or GoogleDrive). If the core is updated, you can then compare the files with a text editor. Personally, I use BBEdit on a Mac, haven’t found anything really good on a PC for lack of trying because I do most of my coding on a Mac, but I’m using Eclipse on the PC for LeagueManager now to keep my projects separate, it’s got some nice features… As you step through the code, you’ll see where there are changes and you can work to merge them together.
c). If you’ve got some cool features you’d be willing to share with the LeagueManager community, let me know about them, send me your code and if I agree I’ll incorporate them in the core code (I’m easy to get along with, any feature that others would like, I’d be thrilled to talk about committing to core).
Of the three options, I’d vote for ‘c’. As a community, it would be great to get some code from users. My original use of LM was on a basketball website I was working with. As I used the plugin I found things I wanted, so I wrote them in (many of the new features that were added in the most recent updates came from my personal use). The best was to get new things in and tested is to have them live on a site someplace.
2). Yeah, something’s up with the position numbers and I’m about to dive into the code to track it down. I personally see what you do, the positions starting at 0 and 3.8.8.3 had fixed it so that I saw (as you would have) the positions starting at 1 instead of 0. Unfortunately, some see 1 now and were getting 2 as their start position after that update, so 3.8.8.4 reverted the code (and I saw 0s at the beginning again, but I figured it was just me due to the variety of changes I’ve made). I’ll get to the bottom of it tonight and will have it fixed shortly.
I apologize for overwriting of your mods, I know what’s frustrating, hopefully you’ve got some backups that you can pull from…
