Online dictionary creator

Minisweeper

Its obviously not very high on anyones priorities but it might be nice to have an online dictionary creator/updator (as an extension or standalone document or whatever) which loaded all the definitions into a page with edit boxes and allowed people to write dictionaries that way instead of having to edit the files (which while being perfectly simple *might* scare a couple of people off). It might also make it easier for people to work together on translations If people want it i'm willing to have a go at writing it (shouldnt be that impossible?) What do you think?

Mark

That would be awesome. Esp if it was wiki-style where it held revisions and allows rollbacks.

Minisweeper

Um. I guess if i actually put some thought into it i could make it run rollbacks. Maybe i'll give it a go then?

Minisweeper

Mark - how much is the dictionary changing between now and (1.0)?

Mark

Not very much at all. There will be a few definitions removed and a few added, but it's still an associative array and it will be named the same.

lech

hmmm, I don't suppose there's an inactive option to "view as plain text" on the wiki, is there mark? I suppose then you could easily post each language dictionary to it's own namespace ala vanilla:translations:en-US , vanilla:translations:en-UK and the like and give each one their own page for wikitizing.

Minisweeper

Hmm. Well i've knocked together an *Extremely* basic idea of what i'm talking about here: http://www.badassg.me.uk/lussumo/dictionary.php so people who might not have quite understood know what i'm talking about. You'll see what i mean by basic - my php is rusty at best and i've knocked it together in a drunken stupor while watching coupling on my second screen. I'll try and get it to a slightly more reasonable stage tomorrow.

lech

hehe, yeah, I'll wait until a sober attempt is knocked together. BTW coupling is absolutely brilliant, I'm happy there's a station here in Chicago which plays a few episodes every saturday.

Minisweeper

lol. That was rather appauling wasnt it. It gave people the general idea though...and it probably wont improve much now that i am sober(ish) And yeah, i downloaded all 4 series' so i watch a couple occasionally. I love jeff.

Minisweeper

So, do you think it'd be better to use editboxes as opposed to text inputs since some of the stuff will be multiline? And excuse my ignorance but how can i force it to ignore the html within the editbox?

lech

hehe, the whole cast is absolutely hysterical in their own right if you've watched many of them, however I'm not even sure what season im even watching.

So, do you think it'd be better to use editboxes as opposed to text inputs since some of the stuff will be multiline? And excuse my ignorance but how can i force it to ignore the html within the editbox?

A mix of the two would be wise especially for those extra long paragraph inputs. To ignore html within either of the areas, you'll need to do a proper conversion when reading out, so tags get converted to their proper html entities rather than raw tags being displayed. That way the browser will render the entities and not get confused with the code. That makes sense, right?

Minisweeper

Yeah, a mix of the two would be more ideal but i'm designing it to run on the fly. I suppose i could calculate if its longer than X characters and if it is then i could use editboxes. And yeah i could render the entities, that doesnt really help the novices i'm aiming at though because it might confuse them - isnt there another way to do it? And ofcourse the whole cast is funny, i just love all the stupid shit jeff comes out with (i suppose i can relate to him most..=\)

lech

I suppose if you're including this as an extension, having the most options would be really kick ass so admins can easily create translations as they need them. As for the entity portion, thats pretty much the safest way to avoid markup from actually rendering, and the only time you'll need to do it is on the read INTO the form, not to the save. at least for < > and other special characters which would get interpreted as part of markup and become rendered. The conversion inbound and outbound would also be extra helpful for arabic and asian languages and highly special characters. The fastest way to populate your selected fieldtypess, would be as you said, check for the character length, another quick way to set up the values would be just to load everything into an array and spit it out field for value to save yourself from doing it all one-by-one painstakingly by hand.

Minisweeper

you lost me with the array thing. In any case i've urlencoded the values and put longer things into edit boxes and its starting to look slightly more sensible. Any way i can make the edit boxes grow according to their contents?

lech

for each value, echo it's handler and accompanying value. that should make sense, however I'm not too keen on how to make that friendly enough without creating an exploit. mark any ideas on how to do something like that?

Minisweeper

well its like this: http://www.badassg.me.uk/lussumo/dictionary.php at the moment with the handle on one side and the value on the other (am i right in thinking the dictionary used to have the origional definitions as comments on every line to help you edit it if you couldnt work out what it was meant to be saying? and if so where did they go?) And it gets all that from the file dynamically; which is good because then when new definitions are added it will cope with them. But how can i then make it rewrite the file when i dont know how many bits i'm gonna be writing into it? Obviously i can make it pass all the variables with a save button but that doesnt really achieve much. I assume i need an array of some sort but i've never really used them in php...

Mark

I actually think it would be pretty cool to extend the Dictionary to a point where admins can turn an edit mode on, and then there is an edit button at the end of every piece of text on the screen (for admins) that allows them to click it and be presented with a form where they can edit that text and save it. That way you can just go through the application page by page converting all of the text and seeing exactly what it looks like.

Minisweeper

oh hell you just flew this rocket right out of my launchpad. That would be awesome but theres is no way in hell i could achieve it. *passes the torch.

Minisweeper

as a pointer, if someone was gonna do this with the dictionary, it should also be done for stylesheeting?

Minisweeper

Right, i've just about got it working as i was planning on getting working atleast, i just need to learn how to use arrays properly and stop messing around with stupid variables. Then unless someones willing to implement marks rather superb idea i'll carry on getting it more useful for multi user development and such like. Night.

Minisweeper

If someone else could post in this thread so its not just my drunken ramblings it'd help a lot... ;) Excuse my ignorance, but how can i create an array (i think i want it containing a definition id, name, and value) from the form input? I have the id, name, and value, but i dunno how to get them into an array?