May Contain Nuts

For those who are waiting for the Archive on DPWR to actually become something useful again, here’s a large chunk of good news for you.

As of tonight, the upcoming Archive refresh will feature the following:

• Search - Finally, you don’t have to know the name and category of what you’re looking for before you can find it!
• Tags - Articles can have multiple tags applied to them, similar to WikiMedia’s Categories tool. This will replace the current category architecture in the Archive.
• Revisions - Editing the Archive will no longer be a volatile process. All changes are stored in the database, so if something gets defaced, it can be reverted without issue. (Note: this may not apply to attached images, I’m still looking into that)
• Templates - Like WikiMedia’s {{template}} tags, the Archive will now support (albeit in a slightly flaky manner due to the restrictions I’m dealing with) the ability to insert pre-existing bits of text into another article (i.e. the ability to add a “stub” template to an overly-brief article). It even allows you to define variables to replacement later (this is where it gets slightly flaky, but there’s little I can do to remedy this issue right now).
• Recent Updates - It’s not a completely-functional “view new entries/edits since last visit” feature, but it’ll show you the last 25 things done to the Archive, which is a start. I’ll likely be expanding on this in the future.
• Discussion Topics - Each new Archive entry will generate a topic in the forum for discussion. If you really want to know what was added since your last visit, viewing the new topics in this forum would be a good place to start.
• Tables of Contents - Like WikiMedia, the Archive will, if instructed, generate a table of contents from any [h="value"] tags located in the article.
• Pagination - Incredibly long articles (I’m looking at you, D’ni Timeline) can now be broken up across multiple pages.
• Functional Subscriptions - Subscribe to an article or an entire tag. The Archive will PM/Email you when something happens.
• RSS Feed - The Archive now features an RSS feed with the most recent edits to the Archive. Subscribe and stay up to date!

I’m incredibly thrilled about this upgrade. I’m finally bringing the Archive out of the rigid forum-based structure it has existed under since mid-2001 and applying more modern Wiki principles to it. Now I just have to finish the rest of the site… look for the all-new DPWR by the end of the month, provided IP.Gallery gets released in a timely manner.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 2:26 am and is filed under DPWR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.