[CompInaBox-discuss] Comp Admin Area thoughts....

[Eric D N. <nie...@MI...>]

Here's the briefly mentioned followup to the previous email, detailing the
problems with the per-competition admin area.

The competition admin area currently offers a variety of services:

At a glance reports on:
  Payment status of individuals
  Payment status of teams
  Confirming the accounting of checks
  Any refunds required
  Fees received, waived, total income from registration, total outstanding

Payment tracking:
  Entering payment waivers
  Entering registration fees paid by checkes (PayPal payments are auto-entered)

Registration Management:
  New Registration
  Search & Edit existing registrations
  Explicitly opening or closeing registration

Announcements:
  Message of the Days
  Mass email to competitors or people registered with TBAs

Exporting:
  Assigning numbers
  Generated Printed Program excerpts
  Exporting to scrutineering tools (only S3 supported via the web at present)

Several other desireable reports and features have been indentified, but given
the current development pace, I'ld like to focus on organizing what we have,
not what we might have.

The page layout is poor ATM; I'll try to get a screenshot up somewhere for
developers without admin access to a competition to see.  But the rough outline
is that all of these features typically have their own sub-page, but are
directly reachable from the admin index.  I think we'll need to introduce some
mid level pages to control the fan-out at a given level.

Access to the admin pages are limited to users with cib_central accounts and who
have been explictily granted some level of access to the named competition. 
There are four access levels at present -- Staff | (Registrar | Comptroller) |
Coordinator.  In order of increasing access permissions.  I'm considering
adding a "Scrutineer" level as well -- this would be roughly below Staff in the
hierachy and would only have access to the Export Data to Scrutineering Tools
features -- payment information and total must be masked.

The largest problem is that at present the main page is VERY slow to load due to
the inclusion of the registration totals -- these used to be fast to calculate
before the addition of the multiple registration deadlines and audit tables. 
Now they are quite slow and can become extremely frustrating for administrators
of large competitions.  The simple solution is to move the payment information
off the main admin page, along with the reports, etc leading to a simpler
layout and a more unified funcation area that can be easily hidden from
non-appropriate people.

The second biggest problem is that the admin registration features -- new
registration and registration editting currently simply feed into the regular
process.  This means that
1) the admin can not override the registration rules even if s/he wants to
2) the admin sometimes "loses" their login and can't use use "back" to return to
the admin area.
3) there isn't anyway to do a lot of the common cleanup tasks (like merging
duplicates, or identifying/removing ghosts)
These problems are primarily bug-fixes or new features and wouldn't be addressed
by a simple reorganization, but are worth keeping in mind at this point.

Eric