Sitephyre Banner Raider

[MadGypsy]

I didn't really work on this much last night. Instead I went to bed at like 8. But I woke up at 4 and spent about the last 4 hours chopping up sitephyre scripts and modifying them to create a CMS for a banner.

Am I finished? No, but I should be by tonight or tomorrow.

I have:

1) database, tables, users & permissions creation/install script
2) sign-in/out/up form
3) some owner stuff that can be set to allow others to manage the banner (this is the only reason to have a sign up form)
4) simple validation and generic security of form fields
5) upload banner image and assign information form (like title, description, links, etc)

so that's ALMOST everything

now I need to make it to where you can display the actual banner/info and put it in rotation. I intend to take my time with this because I don't believe it is necessary to grab the banner rotation from the database every time a page loads. A JSON or XML file would more than suffice. That file can be generated every time the database is updated or has new content injected.

Since that is my method, I intend to bring it a step further and come up with a content selection system that is more advanced than just grabbing the last X table rows in descending order.

In closing, It does not matter to me if Solecords ultimate decision is to not use my idea. A banner cms is a feature as far as I am concerned and one I intend to inject directly into my main sitephyre CMS as an option. Actually, this is already a win for me. Since I was chopping up my sitephyre code to accomplish this, I wound up creating a much smaller example of everything that is going on with my main cms and that gave me a more powerful understanding of how all of this is working together. The result is already cleaner/meaner code.

In other words, this "side project" is not on the side at all. It is directly related to (and now even a part of) everything I have been working on.

I'm getting back to work now. BBL

I'll leave Solecord with this question first.

If you were (hypothetically) going to definitely use this, would you prefer a system where an "admin" (?mindz?) is "in charge" of the content - or where a modder could be approved to maintain their own banner? At the root they may seem like the same thing, but you must consider that the "mindz way" has global banner access, whereas the other has personal banner access only.

hmmm, maybe I'll just make all of that possible. Time to go change the database script (here we go again - at least this time there are only 2 tables)

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I never got anything further accomplished haha. Glad you did though. I did however drop some gigantic grapes on some quakers heads last night.

[MadGypsy]

I'm trying to get more done by skipping things. For instance there is no reason for my install form to be pretty. One person will see it one time. I'm feeling like the same could apply for the entire back-end. It just needs to work properly. Spending a bunch of time making it pretty is basically just a waste of time (right now). Of course I will want it to be "pretty" when it becomes integrated into sitephyre. Solecord however is a programmer and could make the back-end look however he wants. It would probably be easier if I didn't start assigning a bunch of classes anyway.

I don't know if he wrote the CSS for QuakeOne but if so our CSS styles are completely different. I read Smashing CSS - professional techniques for modern layout (Eric Meyer) and highly recommend it to all CSS creators. It will give anyone that reads it a whole new way of considering their stylesheets. Unless it doesn't (I guess).

[Solecord]

Not shooting any of your ideas down, but an FYI - if you're trying to code something you'd like me to use, keep in mind it has to be able to tie into vBulletin. I do not want to run something separate which requires multiple user accounts. I can also implement calls to use vB's user database instead of your own, but just wanted to throw that out there that it must play nice with vB.

[Solecord]

Oh, and to answer your question, at this point I'd restrict it to only allow admins (or moderators of the site) to be able to manage banners and content. I wouldn't want to allow individuals to manage content. No offense to anyone here, but it's much easier to have any random user "go rouge" and fuck up the site versus our select list of admins/mods.

[MadGypsy]

OK I accept your challenge. I have no idea about vBulletin but I assure you I can figure it out. This is going to slow me down. Aside from the fact that I know nothing about vBulletin (but much about PHPBB3), I was thinking being completely separate from QuakeOnes actual database was good. I didn't expect this to handle more than a handful of users, meaning moderation of any kind would really be pretty much null.

If you really want me to tie this into vBulletin I will make it so, but I don't understand why you would want such a thing. A banner client is effortlessly deleted. A banner client that was injected into your actual database is not so easily uninstalled. My method is unobtrusive. "Hands off my main database" is not good?

[MadGypsy]

we are posting on top of one another.

I think I understand why you want it to go through vBulletin. You want to use vBulletins security to process access.

Hmmm..OK. Imma give it a shot. I will be posting the version that you don't want first. vBulletin brings it too far away from my current focus (sitephyre). That will have to be a mod that I create after.

edit: If I get really far can you help me a bit with vBulletin? So I don't have to learn and study something that I will never ever use? I'll prove my salt by figuring out something huge first on my own.

[Solecord]

Let me rephrase... all I'm saying is your code should be easily ported to work with vB. I'm not saying you have to tie-in with vB, just that your code is easily modified to tie-in with vB. If every single function or page of your code has hard-coded calls to an access/permissions DB then I'm not going to take the time to modify it to include vB calls in it's place. Rather, I'm hoping you have a single class/library file that handles the access/permission checks that can easily be modified/extended/ported to implement vB's user login/permission api.

[MadGypsy]

As a matter of fact (if I understand you correctly) you will only have to change 3 lines and actually only 2 if you never intend to use the third permission set. I don't like repeating code anywhere. It still happens sometimes but it's very rare.

I will still look into vB, because I want to see how they perform permissions. Maybe I can make it plug and play. I need to finish the overall app first though. It'll be easier if I can look at it as a whole as opposed to piecing it together as I go.