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What's News in the PlayBasic world ? - Find out here.
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Home Page Update V0.58
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By: Kevin Picone Added: February 28th, 2013
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Category: All,Website
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You might have noticed there's been some changes appearing across PlayBasic.com over the last week or so. This version of the site was originally built as a stop gap solution. Previously the information found here, was spread across 4 or 5 different locations, which was not ideal. Even today, a lot of PB related information is still hosted on UnderwareDesign.com, most notably the support forums.
Ultimately we'd like to migrate everything into one site, but there's always this balancing act, between where we commit our time, be it, the development of the core PlayBasic product, Helper tools, Source Codes, Tutorials through to the web site interfaces.
One the biggest time traps is simply trying to convey information to the community across the various connection points, such as on the forums / IDE news feeds / facebook / twitter and ultimately here on the home page. Moving text between the various feeds often means converting the text between formats, which just another one of this little tedious tasks that impedes upon development time.
So what to do ? - Put up with the changes between the various services ? or try and stream the line the process as much as possible now. Obviously we chosen that latter, even though we do plan on replacing this version of the PB site entirely. The changes being made to the site this week, allow it to display cross posted PB related content much better. So articles written on the forums can be posted here without as much fuss and vice versa. Which might seen novel really, but it's all those little tweaks that help save lots of time in the long run.
The following extracts are taken from facebook page during the last week of updates.
Feb 25th:
Wow, it's been another very long night of web site programming, although you'd be hard press to notice the changes, since they're mostly back end related. But there's lots of minor front end tweaks, be they copy / layout out related, or things like a fixing a some of the legacy source codes files, which refused to download, since the legacy downloader was expecting them to be zipped or rar's.
One of the bigger back end changes is the addition of a spam bot black lists which is a feature i've dragged over from my new CMS, but the legacy sites didn't have. Weeding out the spammers from the pages is necessary to get a clearer idea of how much human traffic is using the site. Granted the home page has never really been that popular, and there's really no reason for it to be, since it's not a portal, it's just a site with some PlayBasic related stuff on it.. If we can get a clearer picture of how people use the site, we can then invest more time and energy in adding what people are actually interested in, rather than what you say they're interested in..
Anyway, dunno what else will make it into this minor update.. Time for sleep!
Feb 23rd:
Done a bit more work on the PlayBasic back end tonight, currently updating how it handles downloads. Have replaced the fixed downloader solution with a more generic version that can be used over the site, although it's only hooked up to the source code section. Seems to work fine so far.
Feb 21st:
Been updating the php parsing code for the PlayBasic home pages , mainly just tweaking it all up so it works better. Made a number small tweaks to the templates also, making the formatting a bit clearer. It's still not particularly pretty, but we'll have to wait until the CMS change to see about getting a new html template created. Still want to keep it all pretty simple though.
The update adds support for syntax highlighting PlayBasic code site wide now. Previously the highlighting stuff was only available on the forums. One thing I'd like to do in the future is include an online version of the documentation. Which leans itself better to user being able to attached notes to particular pages etc. Perhaps even translate the content. If you're wondering why there aren't translations already,it's just too expensive.
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