ZSR Forums

OK, so as many of you know I'm working on ZSR.  Once this is done, you guys will be able to make pages without having to know anything at all about FTP or PHP.  I have some ideas that will make writing for ZSR easier, but I want to make sure you guys are comfortable with it before I go too far down one path.  Here are the options that I'm thinking of:

HTML:
I'm sure some of you know enough HTML to write pages.  For example, this is what the HTML for the Steal the Rod page might look like:
Headers go in <h> tags with a number, paragraphs go in <p> tags.  Embedding Youtube videos is a little more complicated, but still pretty easy.  This is a pretty good option.

Markdown:
Markdown is my favorite option.  It has all the strengths of HTML to do complicated things, but is much more suited for writing.  The full syntax can be read about here (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax), but a quick example of the Steal the Rod page would look something like:
In addition to the simpler syntax, you can also use any regular HTML that you need within Markdown (for example, to embed a video).  Honestly I think this is perfect, and if you prefer regular HTML you could write it too and everything would still work.  I hope we go with this option.

BBCode:
This is what you normally use to write/edit posts on these forums (and SDA's).  The Steal the Rod page would look like:
Personally I think this way is awful.  It's a lot like HTML (without the <p> tags) except it's way more verbose and way less powerful.  This way would also be a lot more work for me and I don't think it buys us anything at all.  It's mostly only an option because you guys might already be really familiar with it from posting here.

Plain Text:
This would just be writing text.  Anything you can do in Notepad, you could do here.  Anything else (different text sizes, images, embedding videos), you could not.  The ONLY reason we would do this is if you guys really couldn't figure out anything else.

(For the record, each of these options could have a menu of easy-to-use buttons that you can click on to add the tags for you, just like the buttons you can use to make text bold and different colors when you post on these forums.)

So... what do you think?  My vote goes to Markdown, but I'm open to suggestions.

Also to clarify, this would not affect the way the pages LOOK (except if you choose plain text), just the way that you WRITE them.  Pages written with HTML, Markdown, and BBCode would all look the same on the website.

Markdown sounds good.

yeah go with markdown, it seems to be the least complicated and the most useful.

Markdown is good. I like the idea of buttons to click to add tags too. One thing I noticed about the way pages are made now is that page-to-page consistency is lacking. Some people embed videos different, or don't use the discoveredby tag, or use different <hx> sizings, or whatever. It was especially difficult to edit a page that you yourself did not create because you were just trying to figure out what the other person had done with their code. I think buttons would help at least a little to solve this problem.

Mark down, because you really don't need to know any specific abbreviations or anything.

Some things that bother me abouth markdown




I'm not entirely sold on the idea of replacing tags with careful formatting, but I do like how easy it'd make writing links. Even so, you'd still have to use html for some things, and javascript for hosted/youtube videos, and Markdown seems to be incredibly useless for formatting images on the page.

You shouldn't ever need to write a <br> tag or display code on a page. The ordered list thing could be a problem, though.

And yeah, you would need HTML for anything complicated.  Luckily you can just type it and it will work.

What about some wiki-like writting??
It's just like markdown and it allows to add hypertext really easy
[youtube.com/anything?=jjdhgfbkwu Blue Text Here], I don´t know how would this work on markdown

To do that in Markdown it would look like:

[Blue Text Here](http://youtube.com/anything?=jjdhgfbkwu)

Not exactly the same but I think it's pretty reasonable.  Adding markdown support is way easier for me than mediawiki (or whatever wiki) syntax would be, and they're pretty similar anyway.

Preview of editing pages:

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/8117/screenshot20110101at527.png

I don't like the really long timestamp, but that'd take nothing to fix =d

Now some questions... In whatever order I feel like:
Why is it that the original author and last updated by not another text box?
What about security?
How do you add new categories?
Can you fix the OoT Version Differences page so that it's valid html 4? The fire temple music thing has been broken in Chrome since forever, and now it automatically downloads on me.
You doing anything with the IL tables or the News Archive, or can I work on those?

Yeah I'll fix that.

Those are going to disappear anyway.  It will automatically use the username of whoever creates the page for original author, and whoever last updated the page for last updated.

You'll have to login (with a username/password) to get to these pages.  Each user will get their own account.  Certain accounts will be allowed to add/edit pages, but not everyone.  Each person will have to get approval from an admin before their account can edit.

A similar page.  You just login and click on an "Add Category" link.  On that page you can select a game and type a category name.

Yeah I'll take a look at it and make it HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.1, but I'm not editing anything at all on the current site right now so it wouldn't be different until I finish this new system and put it up.

I'm definitely retooling the News system but I haven't done anything yet with the IL stuff.  I completely started over code-wise though (not even using PHP at the moment).

Since I don't know how long it will be until this stuff comes out, and since it will most likely mess things up if you convert pages, I wrote my own little javascript to generate and properly link the navi bar. Takes one parameter, and if no parameters have been passed it writes a navi bar to the page. It looks like this when used