A language learners’ forum

I strongly believe that this LLorg Forum is suffering from not having a link (a very visible link) to our Learn Any Language Wikia. We have been talking for years now about this important link. I volunteered to help, but alone, I do not have the phpBB knowledge to do it.

Here is what the main page of the Wikia looks like, if anyone should wonder if it is out of date and neglected by not having a link from the forum:

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LATEST NEWS
See HTLAL outages to check the online status and find out about past outages.
Welcome to Learn Any Language
The wiki about learning languages that anyone can edit
Language-Learners.org Outage (April 2017)
Statement from the moderators (2015)

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What's new on Learn Any Language
May 8, 2014
This wiki is now filled with photos!
April 24, 2014
6 YEARS!
April 13, 2014
200th article on the Wiki! +11 more days until the Wiki's 6th birthday.
September 23, 2009
We call out to people experienced in particular language learning techniques to start editing and adding some more articles on methods.
June 15, 2009
A fair amount of work has been done over the last year. Join in!
April 25, 2008
Mission statement written.
April 24, 2008
The wiki has been created. Please help add to it.

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http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Learn_Any_Language

What is the next step? How can I help? How can we help?

Here are some "next steps":

The home page of phpBB has the kind of button links that we need

Home page of phpBB

Here are three suggested ways, with examples, to add button links to the header of a phpBB website:

Number One

Number Two

Number Three

Wouldn't it be nice if our Forum header was as attractive and informative as this phpBB site? We could easily have a nice logo and engaging taglines, and a big visible link to our neglected Wikia.

Nice phpBB Website Header

There have been a number of very good suggestions in recent posts for improvements to our LLorg. Arguably, the greatest impediment to expanding what we can do here is the long-discussed issue that there is no link in the header of the Forum to the Wikia. Most (almost all) users go directly to the Forum and very seldom think of our very useful Wikia. The Wikia is often described as our "static" Wikia, for good reason. Nobody goes there because we don't think about it because there is no link in the header of the Forum.

Here are a lot of comments and suggestions about having a link to the Wikia. Links to the Wikia discussion

I have tried to learn enough about phpBB software but have been unable to learn it well enough to be able to offer to add a link button in the header. There seem to be quite a number of our members who have very extensive web site development expertise. I would be willing to contribute to a fund to hire someone to add a button for a link to the Wikia. I have shown a bunch of examples of phpBB websites that have such button links in the header. In fact, the homepage of phpBB has 8 such button with about 37 drop-down menus from those buttons. Surely we could have a one-button link to our Wikia. As soon as we know how to do one, we can make a few more for some of our proposed projects and improvements.

So I think that before we get serious about new ideas and improvements, we need to get serious about adding a Wikia button to the header.

Just a quick note as to explain a little about modifications to the site. Personally, I've been involved in a few changes and can explain a little about the process in non-technical terms:

The admin team has set the site up so that
1) it is possible to create a copy of the latest version of the software on a development machine.
2) changes are not done directly to the live code but to that local copy and then proposed as controlled changes that can be checked
3) this overall version control allows for security and control of the working website and multiple users can propose changes
4) the counter part of that is that it requires that the participants follow a specific process, install several pieces of software, and basically assure they have a working environment that matches the version of the site,
5) this is very professional has huge administration advantages.

But for small changes, it has a heavy overhead to get the copy running, update the change, propose it, get it approved by the admins and pushed to production. So currently, as far as I know there are very few changes being "pushed" to repository.

My own version of all the software needed to integrate changes is outdated. If I have time to look into this, I'll look into a button for the wiki and also the www blog. It would literally be a question of a few minutes to add it to the phpBB database but the overall management process requires a lot more work. My recent fix to the Twitter Bot took 5 minutes to write but over several hours to correctly post for integration, review and reintegrate on the website. It's an additional and necessary QC process that exists when multiple people can propose changes.

I'll keep you informed.

I repeat my question from November last year:

Which extension does the phpBB site itself use? (I'm thinking of the top links: About | Downloads | Customise | Support | Development | Blog | Community | Hosting)

(No need for those fancy drop-down links, though)

The extension is written and posted as a pull request.
So as soon as an admin can review it, pull it and install it the change will be available.

It took me a few hours to get my system back up to date, re-install docker and reconfigure git. The actual work was 5 minutes (well, after I went down the wrong path of modifying the source HTML... )

zenmonkey wrote:The extension is written and posted as a pull request.
So as soon as an admin can review it, pull it and install it the change will be available.

It took me a few hours to get my system back up to date, re-install docker and reconfigure git. The actual work was 5 minutes (well, after I went down the wrong path of modifying the source HTML... )

Thank you for your work, zenmonkey. So often seemingly small changes can require more work than is obvious. This will be a valuable facility - I forget about the static site myself and l think it will be valuable to all: old-timers, newcomers and potential forum members.

Adrianslont wrote:

zenmonkey wrote:The extension is written and posted as a pull request.
So as soon as an admin can review it, pull it and install it the change will be available.

It took me a few hours to get my system back up to date, re-install docker and reconfigure git. The actual work was 5 minutes (well, after I went down the wrong path of modifying the source HTML... )

Thank you for your work, zenmonkey. So often seemingly small changes can require more work than is obvious. This will be a valuable facility - I forget about the static site myself and l think it will be valuable to all: old-timers, newcomers and potential forum members.

Welcome, but the real work is EMK and rdearman - I may complain about the administrative work of doing a small dev and having to jump the hoops to get it properly ready for deployment. They have done the work of setting up the shared development environment and assuring that the site stays up.

I have merged the code changes and approved the changes, but there is an issue with the deployment script. There was a minor outage earlier because of this and I need to get an assist from EMK before I can complete the deployment. So it will take a little longer than anticipated.

rdearman wrote:I have merged the code changes and approved the changes, but there is an issue with the deployment script. There was a minor outage earlier because of this and I need to get an assist from EMK before I can complete the deployment. So it will take a little longer than anticipated.

Can we look into a better distribution of roles? It's been 3-4 weeks and if EMK is not available (and I get that this is all volunteer time) perhaps someone else can also get involved in the deployment process?