Site Development

This page tracks the development of the website.

See Site Development Reference for documentation intended for web-mastering.

We’re in desperate need of a new webmaster1), if you’d like to know what’s involved contact RobM via PM, email, Forum post or IRC or in person!

[ Oct 2008 ]

• Fixed misrendering schedule page.

[ Tue, 14 March 2006 ]

• Exec page now lists Fred Emmott as web master (complete with bad photo), and the forum rank images are now local images instead of remote.
• Updated phpBB to 2.0.19 - new patches for templates and AlbumMOD at http://fred.uwcs.co.uk/anime/ (these use patch -p1 in the Forum directory) - will update the reference once these new patches have had a bit more testing.

[ Fri, 24 Feb 2006 ]

• Enabled DokuWiki AJAX Spell-checker. If your browser supports AJAX you’ll see a new spell-check icon right-most in the toolbar when editing.

[ Sun, 5 Feb 2006 ]

• Fixed absolute linking for media files. The following now works as expected: {{/Forum/images/ranks/president.gif}}

[ Sun, 23 Oct 2005 ]

• Added a new floating menu: News. This links to the Society Blog which is slowly taking over the role of the news forum, as it get more exposure.

[ Fri, 14 Oct 2005 ]

• New wrapper function added which fixes [[profile>username]] interwiki links. This was depending on a modification made to the previous version of phpBB — the current version features as few modifications as possible, for portability and easy of maintenance.
• Added diff plugin to perform syntax highlighting for patch files. (I didn’t have much success with GeSHi’s own Diff highlighter..)
• Massive updates to Site Development Reference

[ Mon, 3 Oct 2005 ]

• Website remade from scratch (looks and functions identically though): now using DokuWiki 2005-07-13 and phpBB 2.0.17. Of course we already have loads of spammers in our forum. *sigh*
• Enormous number of changes to the code-base, as documented in new site section Site Development Reference (intended to be a reference for any future webmaster/webführer)

[ Tue, 7 Jun 2005 ]

• Termed the editable library page “Exec-view” and the standard one “Member-view” and added a link to the member-view from the exec one, as well as retouching the link to the “Exec-view” found on the library-maintenance page.
• Implemented a new status, “5 - Hidden”, which simply doesn’t display in the member-view of the library
• Cosmetic changes to library:
  • Rowspanning: A new compounded column, “Series Info”, now stretches across all related items when ordering by description (the default view) Incidentally, the border lines in the right columns are there to help when there are many red (due) rows
  • Manga Author(s) are now split into multiple lines (thanks for following the guidelines of separating with a ‘/’ )
  • AnimeNfo / AniDB replaced with icons (to save space)
  • New publisher icon added: hover you mouse of it to read the publisher name.
    • Publisher information can be entered on a per-series basis: One entry of Manga, another for everything else (assumed to be DVDs / VHSs)
  • Similarly, items which belong to a box set now have a “boxed” icon before their name, instead of text (again, done to save space).
  • Added some (javascript) links which allow the page to be stretched to fill the entire window, instead of being constrained to the width of the default site template
• Added comments facility, maximum comment length is 200 characters (including spaces). Also added a small bug fix to ensure entering an apostrophe doesn’t foul things up again. >_<
• MASSIVE update to the library maintenance page - now uses a parsing approach, and creates a log in a new table called lib_log_items. It’s such a big update I don’t have the energy to explain it here.

[ Sat, 4 Jun 2005 ]

• Fixed a glitch in Forum user-registration which caused “DEBUG MODE” errors. Caused because UniID is a text-value in the database, but was being inserted as a number in the SQL.

[ Wed, 20 Apr 2005 ]

• Modified site backend (/Templates/main.php) to check usergroup when displaying schedules, and thereby always show them as editable to the right people, which now includes all WikiTeam members
• Modified /Exec_Schedule.php and /Exec_Schedule_View.php accordingly to allow WikiTeam member access (all other Exec pages remain secure and unedited).
• This was all done in response to SohoLoh‘s query in a change log comment, because AnimeSoc cares.
• Added a link to our /webalizer statistics on the Exec_Login.php (Exec area start) page.

[ Tue, 19 Apr 2005 ]

• Fixed IRC link in forum template to conform to the mIRC way of doing things

[ Sat, 16 Apr 2005 ]

• Added a link to the forum template header2) for #anime@animesoc.co.uk

[ Sun, 10 Apr 2005 ]

• Applied bugfix 247 which addresses a security issue with uploads.

[ Tue, 5 Apr 2005 ]

• Installed the logrotate command in anime‘s crontab, so logs won’t get huge anymore, also hassled CompSoc into changing our log format to replace the repeated “127.0.0.1” IPs with the value of HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, meaning logs now contain a comma-separated string of IPs, with the last in the list being the browser’s IP. Hence I’ve also amended our logrotate to run webalizer on logs which have been fed through sed which replaces such a string of IPs with a string containing only the last IP. For instance: “10.2.4.10, 192.168.0.14, 64.12.48.69” → “64.12.48.69”

[ Sun, 3 Apr 2005 ]

• Modified /wiki/inc/auth.php to combat lost unread post flags in the forum, believed to be caused by phpbbInit(true); the true forcing the usersession to be reinitialized. Oddly, it doesn’t appear to be necessary to force it anymore. Weird.
• Installed webalizer on the site, so statistics can be read at /webalizer.

[ Wed, 30 Mar 2005 ]

• Added printThread($thread) to /Templates/main.php, for use in the ImproManga page. It displays the first post of the given thread with minimal style mark-up.

[ Fri, 25 Mar 2005 ]

• Changed the blurb on “Show Pagesource” pages to inform the viewer that they need to be logged in and a member of the WikiTeam usergroup to make edits.

[ Wed, 23 Mar 2005 ]

• Fixed security bug 212, whereby anyone could read pages beyond their permissions by adding ?do=register to the end of the URL.
• Added the ability to edit acronyms by surfing to acronyms and hitting edit. Adding an entry in there will create a dotted underline to each occurrence of the word, ie: AFAICS. Let’s start filling it with anime jargon!
• Fixed signature, now makes something useful: — RobM 2005/03/23 16:45
• Finished updating the past schedule database, it’s now a complete history of the 2003-4 anime year.
• Fixed a glitch in the ImproManga page — the complete pages table was full of broken links

[ Tue, 22 Mar 2005 ]

• Converted most of website into a Wiki (see /wiki)
• Converted Schedule to use wiki syntax, so there should be no excuse to leave it out of date anymore!
• Modified /Exec_Mail.php to display an editable “Pending notices” area, which ought to prove useful in ensuring the things all members of the exec want said in email are mentioned.
• Modified /Exec_Passwords.php to be wiki-enabled as well (still with same exec security precautions, naturally)
• Modified /Exec_Login.php so that this change log is also wiki-enabled, and part of the public site (see Site Development)
• Fixed Recent Changes of wiki so it no longer displays broken links to existing pages
• Replaced the exec photos in Information: Executive Committee
• Updated /SOURCE files appropriately
• Fixed wiki’s RSS XML Feed, it was spewing out PHP errors due to site integration
• Updated ImproManga to include forum threads (also unified the code from news + impromanga, and placed moved it to a function in Templates/main.php)
• Fixed login session problem
• Floating menus (site header) are now cached by the system
• ‘Recent changes’ and search buttons now displayed on all non-forum pages (there is a CSS conflict with regards to buttons within the forum)

[ Wed, 26 Jan 2005 ]

• Added new exec members to the ‘Exec’ usergroup in the forum, thereby granting them access to the exec area of the site and making them all moderators of the forum. Also grants them the ability to post in the news forum.
• Changed ‘special rank’ assignments (ie President, Treasurer...) to reflect above changes.
• Updated the Information > Executive Committee page to say it was out of date (heh). Need new photos of the exec.
• Re-sized all the rank genre images.

[ Fri, 21 Jan 2005 ]

• Added an RSS feed for the forum (accessible at /Forum/rss.php), and added an appropriate <link> to the page forum’s page header so Firefox et al can display appropriate icons.
• Changed the layout of this page. This means that non-exec members can no longer view this change log; but at least we don’t have to scroll down to get to the exec menu. Perhaps there ought to be a floating exec menu?

[ Wed, 19 Jan 2005 ]

• Updated the library_view page and the memberlist pages so that the links to mail members now do so through our webform, it also enters a default subject line and message for the library.
• Updated the memberlist pages to make university ids clickable (doing so will search LDAP)

[ Thur, 13 Jan 2005 ]

Fixed bug in library maintenance page, where leading zeros were being cropped off member ids

[ Wed, 12 Jan 2005 ]

Added LDAP search facility, which allows us to search the university database of all students/staff.

[ Sat, 25 Dec 2004 ]

• Updated the ImproManga news posts (on the site, not the forum) to have a little padding around the images.
• Enabled the album (aka photo gallery) to accept Flash files as pictures.
• Added ‘real name’ and ‘uni_id’ to profiles in the forum. Realname is only visible to registered users.
• Separated the memberlist into two tables, one syncs automatically with the SUnion, the other is editable by us and intended for keeping our ‘external’ / ‘extra’ members details in for the mailing list
• Made site (excluding forum) XHTML/1.0 Transitional compliant.

1. Add confirmation dialog / page to Delete button on schedule editor
2. ‘Send notice for all items which are more than a week overdue’ feature in library page.
3. Convert Forum to use Wiki syntax, instead of BBcode, pending general approval of the society.

Ideas welcome!