Ye Olde Inn

by **lestodante** » October 2nd, 2021, 9:05 am

But is this still a just discussion or is a website update already coming?
If yes, is there any demo site we can have a look at?
Eventually at what % are you with this?

There's a website coming, but so far it looks identical to the old one. and it's far from ready for me to make major changes yet. The reason is the principle of "DRY": Don't Repeat yourself. The current pages do, a lot, and not always in a way that is easy to just "fix". Yet.

It's a bad example, but I'll use it anyway. In the tree, there's this file, template-page.php. Its content is basically a placeholder and kind of a messy one, but we'll run with it. If you know any HTML, some of this might make sense. I can explain what doesn't if needed. Here's the file, sans blank lines I'm omitting for (some) brevity:

Code: Select all: <?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/heroquest.css"> <title> HeroQuest :: Page :: Ye Olde Inn :: Date </title> <?php include_once("includes/meta.inc"); ?> <meta name="description" content=""> <meta name="keywords" content=""> <script language="JavaScript" src="scripts/buttons.js" type="text/javascript"> </script> </head> <body> <?php include_once("includes/navigation.inc"); ?> <?php include_once("includes/expansion-buttons.inc"); ?> <?php include_once("includes/top.inc"); ?> <tr> <td colspan="100" align="center"> <h2>Page Title</h2> </td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="100"> <p class="hfour c"> <a href="#" title=""></a> - <a href="#" title=""></a> - <a href="#" title=""></a> <br> <a href="#" title=""></a> - <a href="#" title=""></a> - <a href="#" title=""></a> - <a href="#" title=""></a> </p> </td> </tr> <?php include_once("includes/break.inc"); ?> <tr> <td colspan="100" align="center" id=""> <h3>Section Title</h3> <p class="c">Section Description</p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"> <a href="downloads/." target="_blank" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/');" title=""> <img class="l" src="images/.gif" alt=""> </a> </td> <td> <h4></h4> <p></p> </td> </tr> <?php include("includes/jump.inc"); ?> <?php include_once("includes/bottom.inc"); ?> <?php include_once("includes/footer.inc"); ?> </body> </html>

It's kind of a mess, and this is unfair for anything other than the template page, but lemme recreate that for you, mess and all, as I intend it to be.

Code: Select all: <?php require_once('../inc/functions.php'); require_once('../inc/page.php'); show_page($vars, function ($vars) { ?> <h2>Page Title</h2> <nav class="quicklist break-after"> <ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> <ul<a href="#"></a></ul> </ul> </nav> <h3>Section Title</h3> <p>Section Description</p> <ul class="downloads"> <li><a class=dl-button count-clicks" href="downloads/.">title</a></li> </ul> <h4></h4> <p></p> <?php }); ?>

Might be you can mostly read that, even if you don't read HTML. That's intentional!

Where'd the rest of it go? See that show_page line at the top? At the start of show_page, it spits out a <!DOCTYPE html>, a <head> block, etc. It then creates a <body> block and fills in all of the stuff that's "boilerplate" for a page on the site. Then … it fills in the rest of the content above. Finally it puts everything below the content, the page footer at the bottom of every page, closes the <body> block, and closes the <html> block.

Only the content appears on the page. The rest is done by the show_page function.

What about title? Metadata? Descriptions for search engines, languages, etc? And what about pages that don't follow the same header content? That's where I sort of cheated. All of that is set before show_page gets called, except it's not set on the template page. And because it's not set, that stuff defaults to … defaults. You override what changes on the page you're writing. It provides a boilerplate "page", you provide the content.

The problem is, if you look around the site, not all the pages have the same boilerplate. Sometimes that's a maintenance issue, sometimes it's that certain sections have boilerplate that others don't. The stuff that's truly common goes in show_page. But if the content is a game module, you'd call show_game_module and feed your content to that. That'd add the game module stuff and feed the whole thing to show_page in turn.

Once I have the site converted to that kind of nested structure, I can put a copy of it somewhere and start getting feedback on changes. When I'm there, I'll post a link to the pages and an outline of plans and some status report of how it's going. It's very much an iterative process right now. That template page does NOT look like I want it to yet, for example. It's every bit the mess it started out as, but with some of the lines at the top replaced with the show_page wrapper.

by **iKarith** » October 3rd, 2021, 7:11 pm

Fun stuff like …

Code: Select all: <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="center" id="top"><img src="images/heroquest-logo.gif" name="heroquestlogo" alt="HeroQuest Ye Olde Inn Logo"></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"><h2 class="c">High Adventure in a World of Magic</h2></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

really should be…

Code: Select all: <div class="c"> <img src="images/heroquest-logo.gif" alt="HeroQuest Ye Old Inn Logo"> <h2>High Adventure in a World of Magic</h2> </div>

It almost can be. (Some things don't work like that unless you add some extra CSS.) And in my tree, that's the code now. In fact, that little change is live on the actual website right now on one page on the north-american site. Go looking for it if you want—I didn't try too hard to make it 100% identical with the CSS, and I do have to specify a full URL to that gif file … but yeah, it's there and you'd never notice if I didn't tell you to go looking for it. That's intentional (for now.)

ETA: Yes, class="c" is dumb. But it exists like that now, and again, I'm making changes incrementally. Following the DRY approach in code and getting rid of those godawful tables is today's project.

by **Daedalus** » October 3rd, 2021, 11:45 pm

iKarith wrote:. . . It almost can be. (Some things don't work like that unless you add some extra CSS.) And in my tree, that's the code now. In fact, that little change is live on the actual website right now on one page on the north-american site. Go looking for it if you want—I didn't try too hard to make it 100% identical with the CSS, and I do have to specify a full URL to that gif file … but yeah, it's there and you'd never notice if I didn't tell you to go looking for it. That's intentional (for now.). . .

I see what you mean--I certainly wouldn't have noticed without being told. Showing specific changes in piecemeal sounds like a decent way to illicit feedback.

by **iKarith** » October 4th, 2021, 8:11 am

Daedalus wrote:I see what you mean--I certainly wouldn't have noticed without being told. Showing specific changes in piecemeal sounds like a decent way to illicit feedback.

I just did that to give people an idea of the kind of thing I'm doing first. What I did to accomplish that was copy one file to have a 2 in the name, made my one little change in that file, then edited another to use the "2" version. I don't wanna spoil it yet for anyone still looking.

So the original site is over 1000 php files and dozens of .inc (php files with a different extension). Really, the site is 70 pages, translated 15 times more or less, but half of those 70 pages are the same one from the next. I'm mostly done taking the "common" part of those 70 pages and making it one file, that show_page function. Oh, thee file show_page lives in, with metadata and header and flags and footer and navigation buttons … I'm almost done with the footer. The rest of the page is modern HTML 5 now.

If I finish this up before I crash, it means the North American index page will be done—for now. (The content is still a table-laiden nightmare.) It'll be pretty quick work to get the other ~70 pages in the amalgam of english and north-american converted over to use the new template. Then it'll be time to start reworking the game component pages to have ALL the stuff on them. That's gotta be next because it's functionally necessary.

I really should make an outline for what I'm doing and where I'm at. If I was smart, I'd have given myself three posts at the start of this thread to be filled in with an outline of what I'm doing, where my progress is, and later how people can help. The HTML5 project itself, language stuff (including English actually), and scans/images/artwork stuff I need. Mostly box art at the moment. Is there a convenient way to glue too threads together in something other than chronological order in this version of phpBB, or does that require database manipulation and lying about post dates? That's never fun.

I see you changed my title to Web Mage … LOL, I like it, thanks! Works great with the whole storm master rank I currently have for post count.

by **Daedalus** » October 5th, 2021, 1:27 am

Dates can't be changed on posts in the forums, unfortunately. The Inn doesn’t have the necessary phpBB extension. Best I can do is merge topics or move posts. Creating the other topic with placeholders is a good workaround, however.

by **Kurgan** » October 5th, 2021, 10:07 am

Will uploaded files need to be re-submitted by users?

by **iKarith** » October 6th, 2021, 3:03 pm

Kurgan wrote:Will uploaded files need to be re-submitted by users?

Code: Select all: 15G drathe.com.orig/

I haz ALL the filez.

They're a disorganized mess of course. Right now I'm not even playing with the "hqforum" folder, and I totally intend to leave that tf alone for now.

Code: Select all: $ ls drathe.com.orig/hqforum/gallery/images/upload/ | wc -l 1964 $ ls drathe.com.orig/hqforum/files/attachments/ | wc -l 9999

Keep in mind those attachments get deleted after awhile unless explicitly saved, and there is a file, a thumbnail. In the "attachments" folder are files with names like 964_fff41b7cdb5e9d529db3bbe433538928 which I can see is a JPEG file:

Code: Select all: 964_fff41b7cdb5e9d529db3bbe433538928: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), density 96x96, segment length 16, Exif Standard: [TIFF image data, little-endian, direntries=0], baseline, precision 8, 844x617, components 3

When it comes time to migrate to a new phpBB or to myBB, we won't have the same gallery plugin. That's fine though because when the time comes, I'll be able to take freeze the gallery (so people don't add new stuff to it), extract the gallery database, and covert it to whatever format I need it to be going forward. We won't lose anything from the gallery that way. There'll just be a period where it's not available. To minimize that, I'll test the software on samples that won't be kept until we freeze and export it for reals.

A major issue for phpBB upgrades that we'll run into is that we're running some version of phpBB 3. Be that 3.0 or 3.1 or what I don't really know yet. (config.php suggests 3.0.x, but it may have been upgraded without necessarily changing that file?) It'll be hard to even start on that upgrade process until I determine the exact vintage of phpBB (to the point that I can go get exactly that version) and all of the addons we use here at the Inn. When I can precisely reproduce the forum platform we're using without looking at the forum.

The reason I don't just put my working directories up for people to look at what I'm changing here is exemplified here:

[font="Courier New"]
<?php
// phpBB 3.0.x auto-generated configuration file
// Do not change anything in this file!
$dbms = 'mysqli';
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbport = '';
$dbname = '' :goblin:

";
$dbuser = " :goblin:

";
$dbpassword = " :fimir:

";
$table_prefix = 'hqbb_';
$acm_type = 'file';
$load_extensions = '';

@define('PHPBB_INSTALLED', true);
// @define('DEBUG', true);
// @define('DEBUG_EXTRA', true);
?>
[/font]

As you can see, the database is highly secure against elves … but against random hackers … the above information is all they'd need to know to be able to completely control/modify/erase/deface this forum. That's drathe-level access right there to everything. You just don't leave that shtuff lying around! That's why before I can put anything up anywhere, it's gotta be very carefully curated.

There's been a problem for me since last night, the north american subdomain is not answering. Just that one. I don't know why. It's working on my phone but not desktop. I'm due for a reboot, bet that solves it.

Oh, I still haven't done the SVG gold button yet. Still working out how I want to do that. Used some lame CSS in the meantime, and I threw in the KK art even though after I've had some sleep it won't be there on the index page because the index page isn't one of the game component pages. So you get this:

Do you know what the code for that is? I *lemony goodness* ye not:

Code: Select all:  <img src="http://north-american.yeoldeinn.com/images/button-mage-of-the-mirror.gif"> <nav class="components"> <div class="c-sys"> <a class="gold-btn" href="system.php">Game System</a> </div> <div class="c-kk"> <a class="gold-btn" href="kellars-keep.php">Kellar's Keep</a> </div> <div class="c-rotwl"> <a class="gold-btn" href="return-of-the-witch-lord.php">Return of the Witch Lord</a> </div> <div class="c-atoh"> <a class="gold-btn" href="against-the-ogre-horde.php">Against the Ogre Horde</a> </div> <div class="c-wom"> <a class="gold-btn" href="wizards-of-morcar.php">Wizards of Morcar</a> </div> <div class="c-motm"> <a class="gold-btn" href="mage-of-the-mirror.php">Mage of the Mirror</a> </div> <div class="c-tfh"> <a class="gold-btn" href="frozen-horror.php">The Frozen Horror</a> </div> <div class="c-adk"> <a class="gold-btn" href="adventure-design-kit.php">Adventure Design Kit</a> </div> <div class="c-img"> <img src="images/kellars-keep/kellars-keep-art.gif"> </div> </nav>

Oh, but even better!

That little bit on the left side … there's not room for it anymore. But wait!

At 599, it becomes a flat list of buttons and the image goes away.

In fact the only thing that isn't properly mobile-friendly now on that page (other than the flags) … is the content itself. Those three columns… After I'm done with this.

by **Daedalus** » October 8th, 2021, 4:26 am

I haven't considered the ramifications, but should a Facebook button/link also be included in the future? It may help with the spacing. Maybe a bit more space between the lines of the blue buttons/links and the gold bars would also help with the layout and clumsy thumbs. As another layout to try, two columns of gold bars might fill the page nicely and scroll quicker.

by **Kurgan** » October 8th, 2021, 11:30 am

So no "switch to the mobile version of this site" button then?

Ye Olde Inn

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