Performance classes

I have started to upload some performance images, and I have some suggestions and observations that may or may not be helpful.

1. I would love to see "Hunter/Jumper" changed to the separate classes of hunter and jumper. These two classes both use jumps, but the rules and judging are completely different. It's also reasonable that a horse would enter both, and it's frequently the case that a show would hold them as two separate classes. Since "show jumping" is offered, possibly this should just be renamed to "hunter."
2. In the harness division, I'm not sure what is meant by "Driving" per se. I would suggest adding classes for Driven Dressage, Cones, and Marathon.
3. Some of the descriptions I routinely use are too long for the description field.
4. It would be nice if the description and references fields respected line breaks for clearer formatting. (This is especially nice for dressage.)
5. For the references field, it would be nice if there was a clear way to format the link with a description instead of just "link."
6. On the "My Horses" page, it would be terrific to be able to see how many performance images had been uploaded for that horse. Perhaps after "Size:" there could be "Total photos: 5" or similar.
7. When viewing the horse page, the performance images are left cropped which is a little awkward to work with. I would prefer an array of full width, or smaller full width thumbnails, or center cropped, if any of those are options.
8. The workflow to upload several performance horses is a little awkward, because there's no link to add another photo or to return directly to the page where you can upload another performance for that horse from the success page. Eventually I figured out the "See All" button is the fastest next step. Maybe relabeling it "Back to performances" would be clearer.
9. Maybe Barrel Racing and Pole Bending should be in the Games grouping?

I do like that the list of performance entries is on the detail page and also the option to upload reference images in line instead of having to rely on links. I also like the way the records are all associated back to one single horse.

Thanks for all your hard work on this! The care and thought that has been put into this is apparent.

A few more suggestions:

1. I would find it much easier to enter shows if I didn't always have to loop through the entire list of all shows every time. Usually I consider and choose a show and then am wanting to enter many horses into it, and it can take a lot of time to scroll to the show I want, especially because the show titles are all images and the images are slow to load. When I am in this mode, I only need the name of the show, not a banner, because I already know where I am trying to go.
2. My workflow for performance at the moment is to upload the photo and then enter it, but I have to have two windows open to do this easily, or use the back button a lot.
3. The three bands of "Eligible competitions" etc can make it easy to get lost as to what show is referenced, especially because the show title is an image that may not have loaded. That there are ad banners that look a lot like show banners also added to my visual confusion. I think of a competition as a show and a class as an individual event in the show. "Eligible classes" etc might be clearer, or "Eligible Competitions for Zyzzyx Show" or wrapping a box around the show title and its submenus could also help with my user confusion.
4. When you have a moment for dev time, there are good image handling tools that can allow you to easily and automatically make optimized images of any size from those uploaded by users, and I expect that using that and thumbnail images more places would improve the speed and experience significantly. (It also seems like images are not caching locally.)

Thanks for all you do. I'm a developer too and I know how much effort is involved in getting this far.

Thanks for all the helpful insights and suggestions!

Some of them (from the first post) have already made their way into my dev branch and should be released soon.

Things like image handling and some form of rich text support for description and reference fields are high on the list. If you have any suggestions for simple solutions please feel free to share!

As for the over-all site infrastructure, it all pretty much came together naturally, and we'll improve it over time (your suggestions are very helpful and will be noted).

Like your hinted at in your last point, dev time is the main limiting factor, so it might take a while until all these points are addressed.

Images should be caching by the way, if they're not I'm going to have to look into that...

Images don't seem to be caching for me. I typically get a whole screen of the loading images tiled when I go to the "my horses" page. When I inspected using dev tools, images are all set as Pragma no-cache and Cache-control: no-store,no-cache.

It's coming along and I'm learning my way around for sure.

Yeah you're right.

Fixed it in the next update but it's taking a while to release due to some never ending refactoring...