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New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 1:19 pm
by rdearman
Hi everyone, don't forget we have a static blog site as well, and it is always great to get guest blogs from members uploaded and posted to the site!

http://www.language-learners.org/2017/1 ... ngua-pony/

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 1:40 pm
by LinguaPony
Thank you. That's an unexpected honour.

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 5:05 pm
by tommus
rdearman wrote:Hi everyone, don't forget we have a static blog site as well

I hope my comment below can be taken as a "constructive comment": ;)

The blog site is "static" because we still don't have a link to it from the Forum. Nobody thinks about it when they are on the Forum. I have been suggesting a BOLD OBVIOUS link to the Blog and to the Wikia, and there seems to be a lot of support from our members for such links. However, these seems to be no comments from the moderators and administrators.

Let's change the static blog site to the dynamic static blog site. I'll help if I can.

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Mon Nov 27, 2017 5:54 pm
by rdearman
tommus wrote:
rdearman wrote:Hi everyone, don't forget we have a static blog site as well

I hope my comment below can be taken as a "constructive comment": ;)

The blog site is "static" because we still don't have a link to it from the Forum. Nobody thinks about it when they are on the Forum. I have been suggesting a BOLD OBVIOUS link to the Blog and to the Wikia, and there seems to be a lot of support from our members for such links. However, these seems to be no comments from the moderators and administrators.

Let's change the static blog site to the dynamic static blog site. I'll help if I can.

The problem is that in order to put a link to another site on the forum we'd have to modify the code of the forum to allow such links to be embedded. Personally I'm a bit loathe to mess around with the code, and while I'm confident I probably could do it, it has been a looooonnnnngggg time since I was doing production code. But the code is there and freely available for people to modify and then have the code reviewed and approved. So if anyone out there is a php guru...

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 6:15 am
by Cainntear
tommus wrote:
rdearman wrote:Hi everyone, don't forget we have a static blog site as well

I hope my comment below can be taken as a "constructive comment": ;)

The blog site is "static" because we still don't have a link to it from the Forum. Nobody thinks about it when they are on the Forum. I have been suggesting a BOLD OBVIOUS link to the Blog and to the Wikia, and there seems to be a lot of support from our members for such links. However, these seems to be no comments from the moderators and administrators.

Let's change the static blog site to the dynamic static blog site. I'll help if I can.

As rdearman says -- the problem is fundamental to the phpBB software. It's a baffling design decision, but people put up with it because phpBB is pretty much the best forum software available.

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:32 am
by emk
We can add the link, but it should probably be made by editing the the code in the ext/t123 directory. Editing code outside the ext directory is absolutely a last resort, because that's the kind of thing that guaranteed that HTLAL didn't get upgraded for most of a decade. Manual changes to the main phpbb code would need to be reapplied manually on every single upgrade, whereas changes in ext are correctly isolated and much less problematic.

Please note that all the code to the site is public, and I'm happy to review other people's proposed changes and merge them. I apologise for not having time to tackle all these issues myself right now (and I'm still bedeviled by the IP-related changes, which I do really hope to figure out soon). But anybody who knows basic programming and who's willing to experiment can help out at any time.

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 9:51 pm
by tommus
emk wrote:We can add the link, but it should probably be made by editing the the code in the ext/t123 directory. Editing code outside the ext directory is absolutely a last resort

Recall that I have no background in phpBB, but I decided to do some experimenting. I installed XAMPP and phpBB on my computer, and played around with some HTML. I have been able to add the buttons/links at the end of current buttons (after "Active topics").

Image

Unfortunately, the change is in HTML and is probably what emk calls "absolutely a last resort". However, the change is so minor that maybe it is workable. I simply added the two buttons/links after the HTML for "Active topics", as shown in this code:

Code: Select all

<li class="small-icon icon-search-active" role="menuitem">
    <a href="./search.php?search_id=active_topics">Active topics</a>
</li>   

<li class="small-icon icon-search-active" role="menuitem">
    <a href="http://www.language-learners.org/">Blog</a>
</li>   

<li class="small-icon icon-search-active" role="menuitem">
    <a href="http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Learn_Any_Language">Wikia</a>
</li>


I don't know if (or how) this change could be made in the ext/t123 directory as suggested by emk. It seems like something that has to be implemented in the main HTML code.

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 9:58 pm
by rdearman
The other problem with html modification to the code is that it probably only works for the default style. I have found some extensions that allow links and buttons, so EMK and I are looking into that possibility. The problem with an HTML hack is that if we upgrade to the latest version of the phpBB base software, you lose your html hack. But if you're using an extension you just reload the extension pack. So that would be the preferred method.

Re: New blog post on Static site by LinguaPony

Posted: Wed Nov 29, 2017 10:12 pm
by emk
As I suggested earlier, the best place to make these changes is probably here, in the t123/topics directory.

In particular, we would probably need to edit the following files:

  • overall_header_navigation_append.html
  • You would also need to create a language file named "topics_lang.php" in the directory "phpBB/ext/t123/topics/language/en/" directory (which would need to be created). This would look a lot like the en/banhammer_lang.php file, for example. It would contain an translation entry for "TOPICS_BLOG" containing "Blog", for example.
If we make the patch like this, it should work in all themes, fully support translation to languages besides English, and (with luck) continue to work flawlessly even after updating the forum.

We really want to avoid editing the main forum source, even for a "simple" change. Because simple changes add up over time, and once you have a few of them, it gets much more frustrating to upgrade.