Ive been away for some time

[Dot]

I'd like to second Tai'lahr's suggestion.

It sounds like a really useful project, well in the spirit of cooperative independence, and a good way for all of us to keep in touch with what is happening in various areas.

[JWPlatt]

For such a thing, there's no great place in the context of a forum, though you could sticky something somewhere. Putting it under "Resources" makes sense. But it's not so likely to be seen there; kinda buried. With current resources, the Wiki would probably be best with a link to its page on the portal page. How about there? We could sticky something in the forum of your chosing as a link to it.

At the same time, Mac_Fife's suggestion of bumping up the home page a notch could lead to integrating a resource list there too. But later, when somone wants to build a maintainable website here or I get some extended time off some of my, er, other projects. I like simplicity and that home page is about as simple as it gets, eh?

Open Source, however, will likely provide the priority for me and others to make things happen when it happens.

[Mac_Fife]

On the Projects/Resources index:-
I'll need to think more about it later, but for another website I wrote a PHP script that built part of a webpage by extracting data from several pages in a wiki: It's possible that something similar could be done to suck content off a wiki page here (that virtually anyone can update) and have it flow onto the home page. I'd need to get JWPlatt to write up a small config file to allow the script to gain access to the wiki database.

[Nalates]

I like Tai'lahr's idea.

Whether people come and place their own information or we collect it from the public forums it will be a handy resource.

Using the wiki makes sense to me.

With CSS formating and the use of DIV tags rather than tables we can make a nice looking home page and still keep the HTML portion of the page very simple. If that works, I can make something for you to look at. I just need to know the style of art you like and the colors you like. I also assume the home page will end up being a PHP page.

I use Dreamweaver daily so I can go over board. But I think I can keep the page's HTML simple enough it can be edited with any editor (other than Microsoft products) and the structure obvious.

[JWPlatt]

Wow. All I can say is "cool!" to all of you working together. I like business-like blues, grays and maybe maroon/deep red for accent, thin lines and lots of white space. I use MS Expression Web 2 currently.

A moment ago I was thinking of doing a quick Joomla install because I have some dual-purpose experience on it now (on another website) and could have it up in minutes. There would stil be some custom work for Mac_Fife's idea. Does this make any more or less sense to you?

[Mac_Fife]

Well, I was pretty much thinking about doing what Nalates has volunteered to do Only I've abandoned using dedicated web editing tools and gone back to using a programmer's editor.

Yes, I'd say you want a PHP index page. That makes it easier to add dynamic content although, I've done it with HTML pages by modifying the .htaccess to change the processing so that you can put PHP in the HTML:

Code: Select all

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

Messy, but it got round an issue I had with legacy links to an existing site that I didn't want to break.

What I did on the other site I referred to was to create a page that was an index to key pages in the wiki. The script looked up the page titles in the wiki database, then found the last edit, and extracted the date. That was then added to the pages so you got
"Page Title, last updated: date".
That involved several linked queries of the database. Getting the content off a single page should be easier, but I need to remind myself how the database hangs together. We should be able to put special comment tags in the wiki page to mark the bits we want to extract and that won't show for anyone using the wiki page directly.

[Nalates]

I've worked around the edges of Joomla. I'm not really into it. I think it is good for dynamic sites. I know it has some security issues if one does not keep it updated. But what doesn't?

Mac's updates are about the only automated updates I anticipate. So, Joomla may be overkill. You guys make a call on Joomla.

[JWPlatt]

It might be overkill. It's just easy and standard. But remember I also said I like simplicity, and overkill is in conflict with simplicity. So I'm not pushing anything. Whatever you folks decide is what I'll like. I'm easy.

[Nalates]

It will likely be after super bowl before I get much done. I'll be thinking.

[Mac_Fife]

I'm not au fait with Joomla, but I don't really feel a CMS type package is really needed on this site. It's also true that GoMa's forums were brought down as a result of a Joomla exploit, but that was maybe a bit of a one-off due to an un-updated Joomla install combined with using a shared login for both Joomla and phpBB. IMO, a few simple pages backed up by a CSS will do adequately. If you do it in PHP, the page content can be held in text files with minimal markup.

I'm guessing we'd go for a straightforward 3/4-div layout:
Header across the top
Nav panel and content panel side by side
Optional footer across the bottom
That's basically what I've got here (the source looks a bit untidy as it's built from multiple PHP files )

First thing is to create the wiki resource page as suggested by Tai'lahr. Shall we call it "Projects and Resources"? I can do that and link to it from the Community Portal page.

On my own wiki, I'll develop a script to extract data from a wiki page (hopefully this weekend), and send JW a template "settings" file to load the database details into. I'll need to parse for wiki markup and either discard or convert to conventional HTML as appropriate. That'll probably be the hardest part of the job .

I can then give the script to Nalates to incorporate into the page code. Once that and the supporting CSS and any graphic assets are ready, they can go to JW to upload onto the server along with the settings file. And it'll all "just work"