[wp-hackers] Suggestions on Exposing Plugin to End Users

[Mike Walsh]

For a while I have been working on a WordPress plugin which allows WordPress
to be used to manage a youth swim team.  Managing a swim team means keeping
track of a lot of data, some of which is collected from end users (like
swimmer names, ages, address, gender, etc.) and other information is simply
made available to the end users (meet results, swimmer time history,
schedules, records, etc.)

To date most of the work I have done has been via the Dashboard.  Users with
Admin privileges can see and manipulate all of the swim team data and
subscribers can see their own data, manipulate some of it, and see data
which has been deemed necessary for subscribers to see (e.g. directions and
maps to a swim meet).

Currently I have all of the Swim Team admin functionality under the
Dashboard Manage menu and all of the User interaction functionality under
the User menu.  For the most part this works fine (although the Dashboard is
slow) bu after playing with 2.7 and it's new menu structure, I am not sure
my usage model will continue to make sense.

The Admin function works fine but the End user function doesn't have a
logical home with the new menus.

I have been wondering if there is a better (preferred?) way to manage the
user interaction?  I supposed I could generate a page when the plugin is
installed which contains the same content that the plugin displays on the
User screen but I am not sure what I give up by not going through the
standard plugin path.

I am open to suggestions.

Thanks,

Mike

--
Mike Walsh -- mike_walsh at mindspring dot com