Now that we have a web site, I should turn this into a real web site, huh? What is a real web site though? Well, the ideal would be to have it driven by C and Lua as part of SledjHamr. A default web site for the small default home, that supports the basics. It should look something like the IG site, but with user selectable colour, and a hell of a lot simpler to drive at the back end. That's gonna take a long time to write though, and likely depends on wasm becoming popular. An alternative is to take the IG web site, based on Drupal (Apache + PHP), cut it down to the basics, and present that as a working example. Then the user needs a LAMP or WAMP stack, plus it's slow. Middle ground might be to have a basic HTML backend for GuiLua in the C part, plus a simple web server. Matrix-RAD had that. What is a real web site though? Same question, but this time focused on the content. What content / functionality should the web site contain? There's several goals here. An important goal is that eventually it's all just part of the system, can be used in world via the usual GuiLua stuff, from a normal bloated web browser via wasm, or from a cut down web browser using plain HTML. Users control of their own world servers. Communications without starting up a proper extantz client. IM, forum, wiki, email (gulp), and the like. Actual SledjHamr.org site, for users and developers. So add source code, bug / feature trackers, support, etc. The rest is currently random thoughts while I get organised. The IG site redesign aimed to boil out some common stuff and simplify stuff. Mostly coz I noticed that it doesn't matter how easy to use your support system is, users will ask for support anywhere and everywhere that they can, with the possible exception of your actual support system. So, people spray stuff everywhere, why not just have a single place, then organise it later? So no forums or anything, it's all just one thing, call them convos. Then tag them later to sort things out. A tag cloud, and user creatable tags should round things out. So that takes care of forums, wiki, bug / feature trackers, and support. The only difference between an IM and a convo is that IM is real time, a convo is logged, though IMs can be logged as well, and convos can be almost real time. So bugger all really. Should be able to group the convos, to limit them to one or more groups, which takes care of the normal OS/SL group IM stuff. Convos and mailing lists should be two views of the same thing. Email is tricky to get right though, even for experts. An alternative to email is to pass email type messages between SledjHamr servers. So the convos become more mobile. Sooo, the users small builtin web server includes the world control, and convos stuff. This will work via plain ordinary HTML to start with, as well as Lua in the viewer, then Lua in the browser eventually. No email, that's too hard, but maybe later. Any account system should default to world owner created accounts only, no need to deal with spammers. The actual SledjHamr.org web site adds email integration, proper spam protection, random stranger created accounts, and source code. Soooo, what's it look like under the hood? The basic thing is the convo. Any user can start one, either public, or private to one or more individuals, and/or private to one or more groups. They can add whatever tags they want, if not it automatically gets "off topic" or something. They can allow others to edit the first post, thus it becomes a wiki with the "Talk" page simply comments following the initial post. Maybe an option to switch between "IM style" and "forum style"? The default view of these convos is a list of tags, sorted by popularity, looking like a more traditional forum. Should also be a "unread convos", also sorted by tags. All the usual style, colour, image, list, table, etc support should be allowed. Sigs are allowed, but only shown on the first post of that person on each convo. The world owner gets to bypass all privacy, just like everywhere else. Convo creators get to control privacy for their convos. Group owned convos should be possible, they would get one "chat room" convo for free according to OS/SL convention. Group owners get to control privacy of group owned convos. This should all run under Jabber / XMMP style protocols, as well as the web front end, in world front end, and probably RSS streams and such. Email, as mentioned, is left as optional, coz too hard. world server - Lua and C running server side, running plain HTML widgets, pumping them out a built in simple web server - simple web browser - plain HTML widgets. world server - ECMAScript web browser (no wams) - Lua.VM.js running DOM (or plain HTML?) widgets. world server - wams web browser - Lua and C running DOM widgets. Probably don't want to be pushing the entire EFL down peoples networks for each web page. lol On the other hand, likely this will be a single download to get GuiLua onto the browser, then it's all internal skang traffic. world server - extantz client - Lua and C running native EFL widgets. I think this is what the NAWS layer should morph into, it's NAWS at the top, but under the hood, gets converted to EFL, DOM, plain HTML, what ever. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ So, lots of work either way. How about we start with github stuff, since the source is there anyway, and work our way through the above at our leisure? Second step might be to port and simplify the IG website. Drupal 8 might be the way to go, it's hard to tell. https://www.drupal.org/requirements https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core!INSTALL.txt/8 Which needs PHP 5.5.9, and that's not on Ubuntu 12.04. https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/ubuntu/php5-5.6 gets me 5.6.18 but that only supports 12.04 until April 2016. It would also update the Apache to 2.4, currently on 2.2.22. EOL for 12.04 is April 2017. Soooo, might have to bump to 14.04, or go Debian soon. Latest Debian stable (v8 Jessie) includes - Apache 2.4.10, PHP 5.6, MySQL5.5 as well as MariaDB10.0, Drupal 7, systemd. Apparently Drupal 8 will be available via backports. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ An alternative or three. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_%28software%29 Website development stuff in Lua, contains a bunch of other Lua libraries, ties them up with Lua Rocks. Includes a web server, but can be used with other web servers. Dead project, but development mailing list is still going, barely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSOAP C / C++ (does both) web services stuff, includes a web server.