Novul

[Kyttias]

I've finally finished my updates to the PM System. Unfortunately, these were massively deep edits, so I cannot possibly remember all my little tweaks to assist people in overhauling their own.

Finished: PM System

• Sending New PMs
  
• Notifications
  
• Inbox Preview
  
• Delete Confirmation
  

You'll notice I did away with drafts as a feature, because, well... Why do we really need that? And I was SUPER tired of CKEditor, so I decided to switch over to WYSIHTML5 for Bootstrap 3. I can give you a hint for that change over, at least:

In view/messagesview.php, in the newpm() function, find:

PHP Code:

$pmForm->add(new Comment($editor->editor("mtext", "Enter your message here."))); 


Replace and/or comment it out with this instead:

PHP Code:

$pmForm->add(new Comment("<textarea name='mtext' class='msgarea' placeholder='Enter your message here.'></textarea>")); 


But, uh, again... I'm not here to help with that. All the documentation for WYSIHTML5 for Bootstrap 3 can be found at the link provided. There are dependencies you need (jQuery, Bootstrap, Bootstrap's jQuery plugin, it, it's css file, and optionally Font Awesome). And then you just need too add a line of code to the end of your template and, bam, textareas with a particular class name are awesome-tastic (I used the class 'msgarea' above). Despite the effort of changing over I feel a lot better about how lightweight it is.

I've thoroughly checked it for security holes like script injection and it seems just as secure! *thumbs up*

There was only one issue I had, where whitespace was being deleted around formatted areas. I fixed the problem inside classes/class_privatemessage.php, by modifying the format() function:

PHP Code:

public function format($text){
        $text = html_entity_decode($text);
        $text = stripslashes($text);
        $text = str_replace(" "," ",$text);
        $text = str_replace("'","'",$text); // added this so some forms wouldn't break
        $text = str_replace("i>","em>",$text); //changed this over, too - em is standard now
        return $text;
    } 


※ I also found the Report feature for PMs is broken. If you'd like yours fixed, I made this thread about it.

※ The Reply button, as it exists by default, lacks some functionality. If you want your Reply page to not only remember the user's name but the topic and message, check out this thread because I managed to get some help achieving that.

[Abronsyth]

Novul seems to be coming along beautifully! Looks like you were very successful in the PM system overhaul!

[tahbikat]

I concur with Abronsyth, looking very nice Kyttias!

[Hall of Famer]

Well it does look very nice, I see you were using JQuery-AJAX. Congratulations. ^^

[Kyttias]

No Ajax for that, actually. I just popped in an instant header change on the server side where the confirmation page would have been. The page reloads so fast you can't tell it happened.

[Kyttias]

So... I uploaded my site to a live server and everything's carried over just fine after a few tweaks... except... the GD image manipulation I'm using to merge pet image layers is SUPER SLOW. Like, I'm going to need to find an alternative way of generating pet images, that's how SLOW it is. D;

I think I'll be looking into HTML5 Canvas next...

[Abronsyth]

I'm glad the transfer went well! I wonder why the image manipulation is going so slowly? I wish you good luck figuring it out, regardless!

[Kyttias]

I've decided that I'll just save images for each individual pet once they've been generated at creation. Most saved pet images are weighing between 40kb~120kb. If each user has ~50 pets, I'm looking at 5 to 8 GB of diskspace needed once I reach 2000 users. This is not ideal, but I really don't have any other viable options at the moment.

However, during the beta period, I plan on having a hard cap of 200 users, which will at least bide me time to find a place to host my site. Once I hit a certain level of popularity, though, I'm going to be screwed unless I find some place with a hefty diskspace allowance and unlimited inodes.

In other news, I've got an artist I trust to help me out. For now, it's just with item art. In the future she'll also be helping with pet decorations, designer skins, and patterns.


We'll launch with 18 colors, plus three more hidden alterations - albinism, melanism, and a mottled monochrome that will happen extremely rarely if genetics line up just right and the Novu gets both albinism and melanism.

I'm definitely on schedule to invite some of you to help test starting in the spring~!

[Abronsyth]

Oooh those bottles are so shiny and nice! Lovely artwork, glad you found someone to help out!

[Bexasaurus]

I really am excited for Novul!