Very in Love with this site - but have lots of QUESTIONS

[K.Forte]

Hello everyone!

My name's K.Forte and I'm an artist, writer, and researcher (I do coding stuff strictly as a hobby and get paid to do everything else- so technically I can't use "web-dev" as anything official - also because I don't know nearly enough yet). The website I'm making right now is a, strictly, hobby website but it's basically what I work on every time I get any tiny bit of free time. It's my baby and one true love in life. (Not counting human or feline companions).



Basically, it's a little world that I completely illustrated myself and am trying to make livable via the internet. Every time I learn how to make something new, I make something that will work with the website and put it on there as proof of me understanding what it is I'm learning. It's too much crap to get into right now.

I've been wanting to add a virtual pet element to the website for some time now, and have everything else basically made in the background already (such as forums and chats etc -via wp-) but, being only a beginner in php, I wasn't sure how to do the rest of it. In comes my prolonged period of stalking the Mysidia website and script and finally decided to join.

I was wondering if anyone was able to get it working on wp using a different layout they had already created - essentially melting it into a pre-existing website. See, I'm not sure if my YouTube taught method of working is a bit backward or not. I wanted to make sure my layout was perfect before making it functional. Then I started working on its functionality. And now that I know that the layout works the way I want, I'm adding functionality to all of the elements I want working in there... before I even add any content. Because once I know that I have a pretty layout and framework, I feel like then I can add content.

So for now, my website is basically just an empty shell. Like a seashell that has no crab or clam inside of it... just something pretty to look at that washed up out of the ocean with no substance inside of it.

I want to add stuff to it now. And I was wondering how I should go about doing it with this script. Should I load the script as a whole into a little folder and then just cut some elements out of it, or should I just open it up and kinda just rummage through?

I don't even know where to start. I'm really scared I'm going to mess something up really bad, because I've already managed to get my website nonfunctioning and offline for a month because of some random mistake I made before.

Any and all help/advice you can give will be incredibly appreciated.
Thanks so much!! <3

[Kyttias]

This is my take on it, and I apologize for the harshness, but, I'm going to say there's about a 95% chance no one here can help you.

The short story - Mysidia and Wordpress are not compatible.
The long story - You'd have to pay someone knowledgeable in both to help link all that. (Which is harder than it sounds.)

Wordpress is a website building tool designed around people who aren't really expected to know how to write their own code. If you have design built from scratch, rather than one built with a website building tool, then you can make that into a Mysidia theme template really easily. If you don't have that, you will need to find someone recreate the entire look you've spent time on, this time, with html and css instead of a website building tool.

However, even if you can make it look like the same website on the outside, if there are member-only features on the rest of your Wordpress site, they would still have to make an entirely separate account for Mysidia and log in entirely separately, unless you can find someone knowledgeable enough to create those links in a database and generate proper session cookies to log in to both websites simultaneously.

Finding someone who knows what they're doing and is willing to do it will be difficult. We're a very small community of people who also do this as a hobby. Even if we could help, in theory, we may not have the time to invest in such a complicated endeavor. I certainly don't, and no amount of money could get me to look at the tangle of spaghetti code that is the internal Wordpress engine.

If you're super lucky, Mysidia's owner will magically appear and have sudden deep interest in hooking up with Wordpress for the next version of Mysidia, but, I really wouldn't hold my breath.

You'd have just as much luck asking in Wordpress-land for help when it comes to integrated login. Maybe someone would be willing to take a glance and has experience in hooking up generic third party websites.

As a starting point, the developer would need to emulate what's going on with functions/functions_forums.php and the lines around include("inc/config_forums.php"); in both classes/class_visitor.php and classes/class_member.php -- this was designed around hooking about a MyBB forum and would need to be modified depending on the needs of Wordpress.

As a final note, for full disclosure - I would just recommend not using Mysidia and hiring someone experienced in Wordpress to bounce your ideas off of and get something custom built to suit your pet site needs. Mysidia is out dated and has security flaws and I wouldn't recommend it's use. For the amount of effort it would take to hook it up to Wordpress, you'd be better coding your own pet site. More than half the code in Mysidia is just doing the same thing Wordpress does - making a design template, writing pages, and having members log in. It'd be pretty redundant.

[K.Forte]

@Kyttias thank you so so much for your detailed and thorough response! I feel like, in the long run especially, your suggestions just saved me a lot of time and energy spent.
However, I'm more of a person who likes learning how to fix my problems myself instead of throwing money at them to fix them. I think I'll just try to figure out how to code it all myself then, using the mysidia script as a reference then. Because you're right, the lack of update in a very long time is very worrying.
I already have bbpress etc set up. I'm not interested in using mysidias login or forum systems at all. Most of the script actually is just very outdated. I'm more interested in the pet specific tasks that are carried out in only a very small portion of the entire mysidia script. Mostly because I haven't learned php myself yet. If there's something readymade that will save me time, I'd rather go with that... But if there's more hassle digging through piles of code to get to the meaty good part, then I'd rather write it from scratch, like you suggested.

...

I guess I'm off to learning php then!
Thank you for all your help! 😀 👍

[Pear]

Welcome! :D
I am not very knowledgeable in coding n stuff, but I hope you the best! ^w^
Your site sounds interesting too! :D

[K.Forte]

Thanks Pear

[p810]

You're starting out in the right direction by building out your frontend and filling in the functionality. One thing that's very important to remember is that you should not mix the two. What I mean by this is that the code you've written for the frontend should function independently of the code you're going to implement for the backend -- code that talks to the database, for example.

If this is confusing then let's consider how WordPress handles templating. You have templates for different sections of the site, like home.php for the index and page.php for individual post pages. You'll never see a declaration in a template file. A declaration is a variable or a function. You'll see functions being called in certain places, like to get the latest posts, but they're declared separately. This is known as separation of concerns and it's easily one of, if not the most important tenant of SOLID as it applies to PHP.

My personal opinion is that WordPress is not well suited for this type of site, mainly because of its user system and access control, but also because it's a blogging platform that's been duct taped together to be a CMS, so you'll have to do some weird things to get it to be an adoptable site.

But that doesn't mean you can't use Mysidia or a custom framework for your game alongside WordPress (as a blog or general site). Of course that includes bbPress for the forum.

[K.Forte]

@P810 , thank you so much for your advice. I'm well aware that what I'm heading into is a complete mess

The more I look into it and try to sort it out, the more I'm realizing how difficult and tangled the WP code is to work with. I'm doing it just for fun, but I can't help being completely frustrated with the simplest stuff (such as the BB forums) which keep loading random stuff whenever they feel like. And this is simply due to conflicting slugs, tags, and redirects. I'm doing more troubleshooting than content writing and creation at this point by about 80 or 90 percent and it's driving me quite a bit bonkers.

I'm going to start playing with the adoptables code only once I'm comfortable with the way wordpress runs on its own for now.

I guess I opened this can of worms... and not I gotta lie in it.