Wiki styling :)

[svenskmand]

I was just looking at the webpage for the newly created project created (it is currently being created, but is coming online soon) called "Dungeon Keeper 0" (I was announced here), it looks very, very nice . So I thought maybe we should style our wiki a bit with some style sheets and pretty images? I could help contribute images , but I am no good with css and html

[xapantu]

I made a skin a few months ago for the wiki but I am not a graphics, so it isn't very beautiful !
If you post some mockup, I can try to make a new skin !

[svenskmand]

I made a skin a few months ago for the wiki but I am not a graphics, so it isn't very beautiful !
If you post some mockup, I can try to make a new skin !

Cool, I will try that

[andrewbuck]

Xapantu, good to hear from you again; I have an issue that I cannot change on the wiki since you own the files. Svenskmand had suggested we require logins to edit pages and I think that is a good idea. The Change can be made in LocalSettings.php. Also if you could do "chmod g+w" on at least that file, and possibly any of the other ones in that directory that need it that would be good. Currently you are the only one who can edit those files so if you were to leave the project we could be in a bit of a mess.

-Buck

[xapantu]

I changes the files permission with my ftp client, it works ?
If no, I will try to change them with ssh.

off-topic, the project has an irc chatroom ? edit: oops, I have just seen the home page

[xapantu]

I have just blocked the ip 188.92.75.82
edit : it doesn't seem to work

[andrewbuck]

Thanks xapantu, I couldn't get the block IP to work from my account, it was throwing an SQL error. Maybe changing the permissions helped with that, not sure. Also, I'm not sure what is causing it but page lookups on there are very slow. It's like the apache server has to wait for a db connection to time out or something before it will send the page out. I remember you set up some kind of caching server or something for it in the past in an effort to speed this up, although now I think it may actually be causing this problem since the cache server doesn't respond. I might try to check it out myself but if you have any ideas of your own as to what could be causing that I would appreciate it if you could check that out.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

I made a skin a few months ago for the wiki but I am not a graphics, so it isn't very beautiful !
If you post some mockup, I can try to make a new skin !

Cool, I will try that

Ok, here goes. I have made this mock-up, I stille need to fix the stone texture a bit, and I wanted the pergament parts to have some curly edges, but I am not quite sure how to make them yet. But do you think it is possible to make somethink like this?

Edit: the black grid-like lines are not supposed to be there (Inkscape gave some troubles with tiling the textures)

[qubodup]

I like it much better! Great job!

Too bad about the Inkscape thing. I remember having encountered it often too.. I rather stayed away from patterns since then It might be of help if you used .000 rounded widht/height for the pattern source.

By the way, feel free to upload svg files along with the png previews

I think the background´s shading can be made less ´invasive´ (I like to call overly stong use of gradients "1998 Flash animation-like" ) and the paper more paper-ish.

Unfortunately I can not give direct suggestions, but I found an inkscape tutorial site that has some gradient-related hints (HEY TRANBERRY! LOOK AT THIS! ) For the paper, I found an old paper set and asked for a free license.

These vector walls might serve as inspiration/source as well!
http://www.openclipart.org/detail/16802
http://www.openclipart.org/detail/27330
http://www.openclipart.org/detail/17263
(omg ocal does not look like any more!)

[svenskmand]

The pergaments are very cool , do you think we can get the svg-files?, else the png's will also work. By the way you link back to our forum, in your post for the license, does not work, maybe you should fix that.

For the textures in the mock up (in the last post) i used the procedural texture generator I just found. But maybe I should make them entirely in Inkscape, but that would take some more time though.

Edit: sorry can now see that the pergaments where made in GIMP, so of course no svg-files

I have just made a quick switch to the png's you linked to, it looks like this.

[qubodup]

I think the paper needs to be darker for that. Using GIMP´s colors/levels tool might be of help. A good example (but with a bad license ) is http://wingsofahero.deviantart.com/art/ ... -117552813 !

Not bad besides the lightness

[xapantu]

Ok, to make the skin, I need the texture of the background and the texture of the page background.
It would be cool if you post the SVG.

[svenskmand]

Ok, to make the skin, I need the texture of the background and the texture of the page background.
It would be cool if you post the SVG.

Ok, I will do that but I first need to make them, as this was just a fast mock-up. I will consider making the paper/scrolls myself entirely in Inkscape, so we can avoid having png's as the raw ressource, likewise with the rocks. The rocks was made in NeoTextureEdit, but this is also sort of vector graphics as it is procedurally generated , so maybe I will stick to that. NeoTextureEdit uses a format called tgr.

[qubodup]

omg! I did not realize it's open source and runs on linux! (but it only freezes on my nebook )

I would prefer if the background was less gradient-eous, would have less contrast perhaps. Anyways, I hope i'll be able to get NTE to run and come up with an alternative.

[svenskmand]

omg! I did not realize it's open source and runs on linux! (but it only freezes on my nebook )

I would prefer if the background was less gradient-eous, would have less contrast perhaps. Anyways, I hope i'll be able to get NTE to run and come up with an alternative.

Yeah it is a pretty cool program

To get it to run on linux I just installed the sun-java6-jre and sun-java6-jdk and downloaded this version, then I ran the script called "NeoTextureEdit.sh", it worked like it should, although a little slow in Ubuntu , but it might be better with some better graphics drivers.

[andrewbuck]

Xapantu,

I see you changed all the permissions on everything in the directory there. The settings you have allow me to edit files however they are probably a bit permissive. I think they are fine for now but we should look into locking things down a bit for security purposes.

On the issue of the wiki being terribly slow, I think I have fixed it. I commented out the last two lines of LocalSettings.php which were related to caching. The first one just sets the epoch time which is unnecessary since we aren't running a cache anyway. The second one was a list of squid servers. I think the problem was exactly as I had thought. The wiki engine would first wait to see if the requested page was in the squid cache, however squid did not respond and eventually the connection would time out. Then the wiki would build and send the page manually. I also added a new line at the bottom of the page that prevents anonymous users from editing anywhere on the wiki (you can still create an account if you want to edit) hopefully this should help with the spam problem.

On the subject of the skin, it is looking quite nice. One suggestion I would have would be to make the "Talk", "Edit", "History" tabs at the top use a more standard layout for wiki's. The way they are in the dropdown box now no one (myself included when I first started using it) can seem to find them. We want these to be easy to find so people can add to the wiki.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

One suggestion I would have would be to make the "Talk", "Edit", "History" tabs at the top use a more standard layout for wiki's. The way they are in the dropdown box now no one (myself included when I first started using it) can seem to find them. We want these to be easy to find so people can add to the wiki.

-Buck

Ah there's a dropdown box. *LOL* I've always edited pages by double clicking on the title.

[xapantu]

One suggestion I would have would be to make the "Talk", "Edit", "History" tabs at the top use a more standard layout for wiki's. The way they are in the dropdown box now no one (myself included when I first started using it) can seem to find them. We want these to be easy to find so people can add to the wiki.

-Buck

Ah there's a dropdown box. *LOL* I've always edited pages by double clicking on the title.

Oops, I didn't know this problem

[xapantu]

Very quickly : for the skin : don't forget to make a mockup for all elements ! Else, I should make them myself and it won't be beautiful !

[xapantu]

Aaaaaargh...
I losted passwords of mysql in the forum crash (and the one on the wiki is not admin only rw), andrewbuck, can you send me them again ? (I need them to fix IP blocks)

[andrewbuck]

xapantu, the db passwords can be found in LocalSettings.php.

-Buck

[xapantu]

No, only the o233155rw password, the o233155admin and o233155ro aren't in LocalSettings.php

[andrewbuck]

Ok, sorry about that. Sending you an E-mail via the board messaging system now.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Very quickly : for the skin : don't forget to make a mockup for all elements ! Else, I should make them myself and it won't be beautiful !

Ok can you give me a list of which pieces I should make, and if you would take a screenshot of the wiki and mark the pieces this would make it a lot easier for me to figure out which pieces I should make

[andrewbuck]

I modified the Opendungeons.php file in the "skins" directory on the webserver to include a link to the sourceforge logo in the "Powered by..." section at the bottom. The link contains our project's ID number in it (233155), this is one of the criteria sourceforge uses to determine how popular a given project is (i.e. how often does the image get referenced for a given project). Presently our project has been scoring a big fat 0 in this regard since none of our pages had this link on them. Now, however, we should start getting a better ranking because we will be tallying our wiki hits in this score. I also added the link to the Monobook skin, however I didn't add it to any of the other ones. If the new skin you are working on here is added as a different option we will need to make sure to add this link to that one too, however if you copy the skin over the existing opendungeons skin it should be fine.

The project's current rank score can be seen here and you can see the formula they use to calculate the score by clicking on one of the dates in the first column.

EDIT: I also commented back in the "$wgSquidServers" line and added the lines turning off "SiteCss" and "SiteJs" as it seems these were the cause of the slow page loads. This comes from the directions at the bottom of this page.

-Buck