First thread

[Administrator]

Finally, new page! Heaps of stuff on the last one (6).

17 April

Been sketching more breeds. On the site, though...

- made a page that collects your flock statistics. Next, need to add mutation and element checks, then lists of your top 10 griffs, by level/EXP, battle victories, age...


- added link to the Memorial page, listing your dead griffs.
- now working on location tracker map feature. It finds out where in the realm your griffs are currently exploring, in case you forgot where you left them, or want to quickly jump to a place.

First, the visual map:


And then you can 'search' them. Since AJAX is a bit tricky to use in this particular PHP framework, I had to go with JS as usual... and it works a treat!
Later these divs will have pretty background images for each location, and there'll be icons representing each griff's breed and sex (since loading their individual dynamic sprites would be slow). Everything is very sparse for now.


19 April

Decided I'm fed up with the broken pagination system on the flock page. It's really messy trying to switch between groups, on one page. So am moving group displays to their own pages. Other sites all do this, should've tried it from the start...
- Added the quick filter options. Works like a charm.
- Groups are public to view, and link to griff profiles. If it's the group creator (the user) viewing own group, display is a bit different and links will instead go to griff perches.
- Added message if group doesn't exist.
- Removed dropdown list and form from flock page, instead groups are listed as buttons/tabs. With a bit of styling, they'll look much nicer than dropdown.

Hmm, should I keep the create/edit/delete group stuff on the main flock page? Or would it be more convenient to have those options on group pages themselves?
Eh, gonna leave it as it is, for now. CBA to fiddle with form stuff tonight.

And not sure how to deal with ungrouped griffs. Easy enough on flock page - just show those belonging to user, with no group - but how will others see them?
All ungrouped griffs share the group number 0, regardless of who owns them, so obv can't have a public group page for that.
Perhaps they simply won't be visible to others (users may want to keep some private)? Uh yeah, I'll go with that for now.

Ooh, but what if user wants to organise griffs, but still keep them private? ... groups need a public/private option... done.
- Added red/green colours to indicate that status.
- Added visibility checks to group pages - if user has set one to private, others will get message and not see any griffs.

Also updated flock page to use the JS filtering, same as the group pages. Absolutely looove this new trick!
Could get awkward to load if user has zillions of griffs here (like, maybe hundreds... thousands?!) but will worry about that later.
Pagination should work now it's simplified (a single fixed query for the page, not switching to others) and can be re-enabled if needed.

Tomorrow, must tackle the user profiles. At the moment they just have one ginormous list of the whole flock, no group stuff. Need to instead show tabs to link to the user's (public only?) groups. But users might still want to show off SOME favourite griffs, even as a teaser... x)
Guess one featured griff isn't enough - and it's not really 'featured' but the current active one. Maybe have up to 8 slots to show off best griffs and write a bit about them?

20 April

Doing that. There are 9 slots for featured griffs (could increase to 12 or 15 later if users want it? or it could be a premium option) and then user's groups are shown.
Now need to edit account options page, with a bunch of dropdowns and textareas to choose these griffs... done.
Might get rid of the "wanna write about them?" bit, it's pointless lol.


Hmm. Wonder what to work on now?