Oolite Bulletins

Ok.. here's what I'm thinking..

A couple of years ago, before my long absence, myself and a few other members here were exploring an idea we had for a centralised OXP database, which could host files (if the OXP author wished), track updates, and automatically notify people if any of their installed OXPs required updating, amongst other features. In fact, I still own the domain name oxpcentral.net from that time. For a number of reasons, some health problems not least, the project stalled, and I had to cancel the hosting package. In retrospect, it simply added yet another site that needed updating whenever changes were made to an OXP.

Now to my spinning gears.. Picture a website where people can register an email address and log in to maintain a list of all OXP's they have installed. The site could run a script which would poll the wiki, say once or twice a day, for updates, and then notify members that updates for some of their OXPs were available. If it could include the download links as well, that would be even better.

The only real problem I can see with the idea is that I don't think every version update of every OXP gets noted at the wiki, or am I wrong in this assumption?

Wiki updates are obviously dependent on someone doing it... Beyond that: My current idea works for those OXPs that have their own page. Without counting them now, I think that this covers no more than half of them. For those, you can mark information about the OXP as a property which can then be used.

So, the date of the last version update could be a property and you could query all pages that are in the OXP category and whose last version update property is greater than x.

Based on these properties, the OXP List could also be built automatically, except for the OXPs that do not have their own page.

Ok.. so.. some work on creating pages for those OXPs that don't have one yet would be a good first step. Might have to see what I can do on that score.. Wasn't there a list of those here somewhere?

Diziet Sma wrote:

Ok.. so.. some work on creating pages for those OXPs that don't have one yet would be a good first step. Might have to see what I can do on that score.. Wasn't there a list of those here somewhere?

I'm not aware of such list. But if you go to the [wiki]OXP List[/wiki] and mouse-over the links you have all those that link to the BB. Then there are a few who link to their own web pages. Obviously, they would be excluded from the party as well. They should probably get a stub with just the propoperties and a link.

That said, lets think this through first regarding which properties make sense. No need to first create all these pages and then go over them again to apply a template that doesn't exist yet.

Good points.. and on that note, I'm off to bed.. almost 11.30pm here.

The extension is installed now, but it needs to sift through all the pages as a first step. This is currently in progress and might impact performance.

I removed the poll, result was somewhere between 7-10 votes in favour (already forgot...), none against.

maik wrote:

The extension is installed now, but it needs to sift through all the pages as a first step. This is currently in progress and might impact performance.

The extension is ready to be used now.

As announced, I'm going to copy the Infobox_Shipstats_Oolite template which already has the ship properties, the required property definitions, and the Dynamic Ship List (Oolite) from my sandbox to here. This will result in some ship pages showing funny symbols where the property does not get a value in the expected format, these will need to be cleaned up. Also, all ship pages will need a makeover to correctly mark the dimensions such that volume can be computed in the dynamic list.

The dynamic list itself is quite rudimentary at the moment. Once it looks nice, it can replace the manually compiled ship lists that we currently have.