Project Ford

Forums: Index > Planning Forum > Project Ford

Post

Description & Goals Edit

This forum thread is to plan the project to implement the SOE data feed (the RESTful API) to make maintenance of the wiki easier and more automated by generating templated wiki-text directly by using data from the API. On the spur of the moment I've decided to call it Project Ford, since it will allow a fast, minimal skill necessary, assembly-line like method of updating many pages.

I currently have two major phases of implementation planned.

1. Phase 1, item icons: The various item templates will be updated to accept the SOE icon number and generate the correct icon based on that and the item rarity using the icon image from the API and background images on the wiki. This will serve as an initial test of the API and will simplify the icons, which are rather a pain in the rear currently.
2. Phase 2, full item pages: The entire templated wiki-text for an item will be generated using data from the API. The goal is to type in an item name or ID and get formatted wiki-text, just as good as if one had entered values by hand, ready to paste into the wiki page.

Timeline & ETA Edit

I have no ETA for when any of this will come around. It depends on my free time, and how quickly/easily I can implement some things; I'm not a programmer by trade, merely by hobby, and a good chunk of it is outside my normal area of experience. My goal (which may or may not be possible in the end) is to do all of the processing in java so that the user never has to leave the wiki, instead they'll click a button or link of some sort and javascript on the wiki will do all of the data fetching and processing. -- lordebon ( talk ) 20:25, January 19, 2014 (UTC)

User Comments Edit

What programming language would this be using? I don't have much experience outside HTML, but I'd be happy to help out wherever possible. Jeff ( talk | stalk ) 00:06, January 20, 2014 (UTC)

To do it my preferred way, it has to be javascript, that way all the code can be hosted on the wiki and things loaded in an AJAX-y way (e.g., by adding new elements rather than re-rendering the entire page). The fallback will be to use a separate page to do the wiki-text generation, probably using PHP since I'm much more familiar with that than most else. -- lordebon ( talk ) 01:24, January 20, 2014 (UTC)