Fwurg

[Mercury]

The current set of tools features some ugliness, a few bugs and some unfortunate details that I want to fix to make everything cleaner. Moreover, with the new wiki, we should have gained some extra options regarding the direct storing of data (such as for builders) that we can likely take advantage of.

All in all, I think this would be a good time to consider a revision to the tools. However, rather than going over each tool one by one and fixing minor issues, I want to propose taking a more organized approach.

Here are some of the things I have in mind in this regard:

Standardized Layout

I would like to create a standard template for the tools. Rather than designing each interface individually, I want to make a standard style-sheet which defines things like the basic layout of the tool, including details like headings, buttons, selections, etc.

I envision the standardized layout to be a singular CSS file plus a 'template' HTML file which is blank and should have certain area's filled out as well as various optional divs that can be activated by uncommenting them.

The purpose of the standardized layout is to provide a consistent style as well as do a lot of the work on behalf of the developer so there needs to be less thinking about layout and more about actual functionality.

This layout may be developed alongside the new layout for the chat, perhaps.

Standard Library

I would also like to create a standard JavaScript library.

At this time, many tools have their own JQuery version. This is clearly undesirable. Instead, JQuery should be included by default from a standard location.

There should be basic library functions to provide standard functionality such as parsing wiki text, post-loading text with a neat little loading bar, loading information from the wiki database, recognising the group of the user (IC vs OOC, storyteller or not, main account or not, etc.) and so on. Many of these functions already exist, but are scattered about various places with some implemented more correctly than others. The standard library should provide a single source for these kind of functions which can be expanded upon where new generic functionality is developed.

Some of the functions could be more advanced even. Selecting an image from the wiki (and possibly uploading one for use), creating a new account for a player etc. might be reusable and encourage fancy, functional UI's.

We can also integrate this with a standard map functionality (as there have been plans to create a new version of the galaxy map for some time). If we can have standard functions to display an image of a certain section of the map, or to create poly-lines from one section of the map to another, this would be highly beneficial to many tools, I believe. You could display things like trade routes, holonet arrays and a sector overview for example.

Development Tools

With these developments, I think some documentation would be useful. If we have a clear index of what standard functions we support, and what various parts of the HTML template do, we can make it far easier for developers to create new tools. It also helps in making standard functions be used as such instead of the wheel being reinvented several times.

Besides these tools, I also envision a better way to keep track of "TODO"s and bugs, so we don't lose track of what still has to be done in a chaos of various separate TODO lists.

Finally, I think it would be beneficial to set up a repository to store versions of the development tools so that backups can be restored and branches made where desirable.


All in all, these developments should create an infrastructure to allow us to create new tools relatively quickly without worry about anything but the actual function of the tool. I'm willing to put in some time thinking about this, but I would love to hear input (and get help) from others as well.

[Mercury]

Brend and I have discussed some possible area's to focus on for library development:

• Server side queries
• XMLRPC wiki-helper functions
• Upload functionality
• Jqueryui CSS & extensions
• Standaard page layout CSS

[Brend]

Mercury and I discussed the issue at length previous weekend, and we have concluded that some things can be started right now:


Standard page layout and styling. We will be working on a standard layout and styling that is applicable to the forum, the wiki and all the tools. This will better allow us to control the styling and layout of the site, especially once we start moving tools and other things into the new design.


Improved URLs. In an effort to clean up, and thinking ahead to possible replacements of some software, we want to move things around a little. Most visible of these changes will be the planned move

• from http://www.fwurg.net/phpbb/ to http://www.fwurg.net/forum/
• from http://www.fwurg.net/dokuwiki/ to http://www.fwurg.net/wiki/
• a bunch of tools will be available directly, such as the tax tool at http://www.fwurg.net/tax/ and the map tool at http://www.fwurg.net/map/

Maintain git repositories for all the tools and assets. We will start using git to keep track of changes and to collaborate on tools, style, javascript libraries and image assets. We will most likely start using github for this, by creating a 'FWURG' organisation account overe there.


Checkout tool. We will be making a tool that is on the same level as the forum administration and wiki administration to allow one-click deployment of new versions of assets and tools. This will help us quickly push through changes (patches and pull requests) from other players without too much effort.


Shared assets and development library. We will also try to bundle a selection of default javascript libraries for all tools to use. This will include things like jQuery and jQueryUI as well as some more FWURG-specific libraries such as a more streamlined version of the wiki data querying library. There will also be a development library that can generate placeholder data when developing server-side tools.