Welcome to Sailwave Importer for Joomla

Before we begin there are a couple of important points to note:

• This project is not part of the Sailwave Project
• This project is not part of Joomla!
• This project is released under GPL v2.0 or later. That means it comes with absolutely no warranty. if it breaks your site thats not my fault. Sailwave Importer is currently in beta - it should not be deployed on a production server without careful testing

Both Salwave and Joomla are registered trade mark.

What does Sailwave Importer Do and Why is it needed?

So firstly lets make sure you understand what Sailwave is, and what SaiwlaveImporter isn't. So Saiwlave is a windows based (it will also run on linux and mac's via "emulators" such as wine) piece of software which will allow you to score a sailing event. Its a pretty nifty piece of kit and its very generously provided free by Colin and Jon over at their [website](http://www.sailwave.org). Its closed source code, but is free as in beer although Colin and Jon will happily take a donation for it. There is a licence condition that you wont remove the sailwave link back on the results page. We will of course respect that link back when we import a result.

Sailwave will publish files to HTML format and includes its own FTP system to upload those results to your club website (among other options). That means you can set up the software on your club computer save the password in the system and provide a means for your 30 race officers to upload the results at the end of the day without giving them full editing access on your club website. Sailwave does this very well. What it doesn't do well is embed those files within Content Management Systems such as Joomla or WordPress.

Because you can't embed them into the CMS they wont automatically appear on menus, news feeds, etc. They become a bit side-lined. SaiwaveImporter aims to improve that.

You will still score your race in sailwave, indeed you still publish it as normal. Sailwave Importer simply imports that file into Joomla for you.

What are the alternatives

Well Sailwave does a pretty decent job of handling publishng its self. So there are no problems with using the built in FTP system alone - you could just create some menu links to the HTML files.

Sailwave has a publish to Blog Function. This will allow you to cut and paste the results into a Joomla Article. It works. But if you want a simple solution that 30 different Race Officers at your club can use - I'm not convinced I want to give 30 people rights to publish pretty much anything on my club website.

How does it work?

Installed as a component and plugins - it will use a trigger through a plugin to detect if there is any new files awaiting upload. If there are it checks they are valid files. If valid they are processed and the content imported into a standard Joomla Content Article. If it is an updated result the previous article is updated. All the normal features available to Articles can then be made available, including plugins such as AcyMailer and extAutoTweet.