vStone Blog

I noticed there were some validation issues with the bubbl.us plugin earlier and decided to fix them so I could once again put a xhtml strict button on my blog (YAY).

I’m not going into the details, you can find my freshly source here: bubbl.us_embed

I really need to keep track of all the changes I make to the original ALP script because it may provide difficult to find out afterwards… It’s one big mess

Display (Used to display tables. Used in: users / console list / …)

The display has been modified the following way:

• You can now specify separate queries for each group you define. This way, it doesn’t matter that much what you specify in the constructor. If you set a query, it will be used for group 0. (backward compatibility anyone?)
• You can specify html code to insert into the table before displaying cells. You can add some colgroup(s) with markup here for example.
• The possibility to have a group title is also possible now.
• The ability to use custom cell renderers to render a certain field value (default fields are also supported).
• Note: You can also use strings for adding different groups. The default group should always use 0 though.

Universal (used for almost everything that involves a form)

• Added support for multiple forms on the same page. works only with the display() function that checks what form name is specified before processing. You can also copy this method and adjust it to fit your needs.

Today is the day I ‘officialy’ start coding NARPed v2. Version 1 was more a fork of ALP. Although there are people working on ALP2, I don’t feel like modifying another existing platform, nor do I feel the need to keep working on the old ALP codebase while something better will have to come eventually anyhow.

At first, I’m all about thinking out how the website should look like and how I should build it. You can see a little of my toughts on this scribble:

[bubbl]http://bubbl.us/sys/view.swf?sid=144625&pw=ya/mUumf.w6D.NjZDZlUuSThwSGhVaw;500;400;NARPed[/bubbl]

First off, a quick introduction to ALP:

ALP stands for ‘Autonomous LAN Party‘ and is an Intranet LAN Party Management Software Package written by LAN admins for LAN admins. The original website can be found on the nerdclub alp website.

As you will notice, development on the website has stopped a couple of years ago, but ALP is not dead. Since a couple of weeks ago, a small group of developers started on ALP2. You can find more information on ALP2 on the new forum and wiki. I’ll volunteer myself to help out once I finish off this project on the old alp.

And what the hell is a NARP?

A NARP (stands for Not Any specific Reason Party) is these days becoming more and more popular. It was invented by a gaming community called ‘Destructoid’ (homepage is – captain obvious speaks – http://www.destructoid.com/). The main difference with a LAN is that it can involve consoles. My friend Johan is organising a NARP this summer (end august) and we needed a decent system to handle all the consoles and people that are coming, so we looked into ALP but found there was a lot of functionality missing.

That is when I started converting the old ALP to work for NARPs too. I added a console list, console games and statistics about the lot of them. In the mean time, I also adjusted plenty of core files to be better, faster (errmmm not really, but it just sounds good) and stronger.

I’ll be posting a changelog about what I changed to the original ALP soon and I’ll also publish the source later on. I’ll have to convert the install to fit some extra tables I introduced and some have just changed a bit.

In the mean time…

While you are waiting for the source and you are interested in coming to this NARP (to game, slack or talk code), make sure you check the website here and here.

Since the beginning of this week, I’ve been altering my code base for the Kickstart BASH script a lot. After a while, I decided it looked horrible, lacked documentation and was unmaintainable (and certainly not expandable). I also have the bad habit of forgetting what a certain function does, so proper documentation is a must.

So I started with getting back too my good old classes and objects. Starting off with the Output to HTML / Text or a File, I’m converting everything to fit nicely in classes and mainly use objects. And started documenting them all. You never know my code might prove useful to somebody else. You can expect to have a link show up to the phpdocs pretty soon.

Next up is converting my kinda ugly template system to Classes. Probably Options will prove useful here too. And I’ll be able to re-use them from my Output.

Yesterday I started with some inline svg in a xhtml webpage. And it proved to be a great challenge to make the damn thing valid. I tried multiple solutions and finally I found the following blogpost. There are 2 solutions according to :ism:

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