Site upgrade v2021 early plans

[Daedalus]

Hope you have enough web juice for the job! With great power comes great sterility . . . no, wait--that's not right.

[iKarith]

Hope you have enough web juice for the job! With great power comes great sterility . . . no, wait--that's not right.

I wouldn't mind if we got it to a point that others who have the skill, but maybe not so much time, can help out. I don't know if drathe gave you access to the raw site (you'd need that to be able to add translated game component scans), but it's pretty ugly for now. It's ugly and I can't promise I'm going to make it not ugly in the near term.

The way it's set up right now, http://www.yeoldeinn.com/ is in one directory (and it's the root of my ftp access). In /english is http://english.yeoldeinn.com/. Which means you could go to http://www.yeoldeinn.com/english/ and it would take you to english.yeoldeinn.com. I don't know for certain all the links or other pages would work properly if you tried to use the English page as a subdirectory, but it's there and at least the index page loads, it doesn't redirect you, etc. Tested that last night.

I think my first task is probably to make all links relative to this tree so that at least in MY copy of the website, going to /english is the "right way" to get to the UK English page. That'd allow me to shove the whole thing in a test directory and just modify that as I go and get feedback as I work.

[Daedalus]

I can't add stuff to the Inn, as my workings aren't raw--it's more like they're canned. I'm mainly good for adding opinions and a few sage uh-huhs. If you can get a test directory set up to present parts to the whole Inn, I'd likely give general feedback along with several of the more involved members, I imagine.

A private room can also be set up by drathe, but you probably can confirm that the forums would be insufficient for more than discussion of Homepage stuff presented for feedback. Still, one might prove useful for coordinating efforts if some more of the techy members joined in the renovation.

[iKarith]

Not quite ready to give this tree to the world to look at yet because I'm still finding things in it and … I don't know if there's maybe something in my tree I shouldn't hand out, like an admin password for the board or something. (Pretty sure that's not in there, but if it was… yeah.)

I'm in a very tedious part of the project now—you might realize that there are 1000+ pages on this site, not including any part of the forum or the archives of agin's inn or phoenix. Most of those are the 70 or so php files in each of the 15 language folders. A big part of this project is going to be making the site about 15x easier to maintain.

Then the actual HTML markup changes begin!

[iKarith]

Just removed a couple hundred (virtually) identical files from my tree. Each language is about 70 php files and about 20 include files plus images and whatnot. That totally excludes the download content which I'll manage separately. The reason it wasn't a lot more is because I'm saving the files that have actually translated content in them. There's intended to be ONE site when I'm done rather than 15 copies of a site with minor variations and some few of them translated. But I don't want to give up those translations.

I've been thinking about those. When we write software for a world audience, the author doesn't speak all of those languages. But they set up their program to "do things right" and they can offer a file containing all of the strings used in the program to someone who speaks a language they don't. That person can translate the strings all in one place and send the file back, sometimes with feedback if something needs to be changed to make the translation better.

Why wouldn't you do that for a website? Well … there's a lot more text. Like paragraphs and things. That's true, but there's also a lot of short bits of text too. "Back to top", "Home", "Forum", etc. And those little strings get used all over the place. So my notion is that those things should go in a strings file. In fact, if I use the .po file format, there's actually tools to help people edit and update them. Bigger text blocks like rules and whatnot? I dunno yet, but there's ways.

Typically for plain HTML you'll have index.en.html, index.es.html, etc.. Something like that. Better organized than the current layout. This is php and apache! I should be able to have going to yeoldeinn.com/it/ be the same thing as going to yeoldeinn.com except anything that has an Italian translation will be rendered in Italian.

Page mapping … I'm gonna need to do some magic so that any language.yeoldeinn.com/page.php gets rewritten. Going to such a page should moved permanently message. There's two parts of the URL that need to get remapped based on lookup tables. I don't actually know how to do that for two, just that it can be done. I'll have to look that up.

Oops, the Web Mage is not supposed to tell you that there is a spell he hasn't learned yet.

[Pentroncius]

I have my concerns over moving to a single English only version of the site. Primarily because of the two (in my view - wildly different) versions that exist; might it be better to provide a European and American version?

[iKarith]

I have my concerns over moving to a single English only version of the site. Primarily because of the two (in my view - wildly different) versions that exist; might it be better to provide a European and American version?

Plan is (and I'll be demoing this long before it gets uploaded to the main site for feedback) that rather than having language versions of everything with most being EU version, US English being NA version, etc, that game components will be offered all on one page. So the system page will have Rules of Play/Instruction manual available in these editions … Premiere: <languages> European: <languages> North American: <languages> Japanese: … Hasbro: <if ultimately released for download>

So there'll be one page, and things missing in a given language (which is admittedly a lot of things) will be clearly indicated. For stuff that doesn't exist in a given edition (so Against the Ogre Horde or Wizards of Morcar in NA for example) the phoenix version will be provided as the best we've (currently) got with a note that it's his, not MB's. After the official or (subjectively best available) versions of everything in any language we've got, I'll try to link to others … some on our site, some offsite if I know about them. That's another reason for wanting to get feedback when I get there: I want to make sure I at best maintain the current state of what we have, if not add to it.

[iKarith]

Oh, regarding Hasbro edition … I plan to take scans of Hasbro edition components and store them on the server, but not available for download while Hasbro edition is in publication. Some time period after it goes out of print, we can flip a switch or something and those files will go live for download for people who want them … but not until some time after Hasbro has stopped printing it.

_ALL_ of those files are literally a Copyright infringement if Hasbro cares. They have not cared about the old editions, which is cool of them to decide that if they're not going to publish it, we can host it for individuals to produce a copy for themselves. But from where I sit, they have a right to sell their product without being undercut.

Versions WE make of stuff in the new style should be fair game, but their own stuff is for sale and I'd rather not cut into that. (I still kinda wish I had some sort of unofficial back channel to someone at Hasbro/WotC to tell me e.g. "We're considering doing Against the Ogre Horde" or "We're not going to do that one" so I could more know what won't be stepping on their toes.) Have to play it by ear and be ready to back off if Hasbro/WotC asks.

[Daedalus]

That all sounds like a wise course of action to me. No need to stir up trouble.

[iKarith]

I'm still attempting to determine what exactly /waffle.php was about. I assume one had to be there.