Interactive Story Development Thread

[TheoW]

As I said on a different thread, I've decided to see about adding a Choose your own Adventure/Change style story section to the site. It seems like a few people are interested and it could be fun to do.

To this end I've taken it upon myself to write this part of the site from scratch. I've never worked with PHP or SQL before, so it's been a bit of an adventure. That being said I've gotten pretty far, to the point that it's nearly ready for some basic usage.

Right now everything is on my local box, but sooner or later (probably by the end of the week) I'll have it up and open for people to start working with... and breaking, I'm sure there will be a lot of breaking.

There will also be a lot of things missing. No user accounts just yet (but things are being set up for them in the future), no notifications, no editing, no text encoding, no linking. It's pretty basic text... but it should work when I have it up and running.

Oh, one nice perk from all of this. Once I get all the extra features done it will also provide some groundwork for a story archive to go along with the forum.

[Maximus]

Great news! Can't wait to test this out!

[TheoW]

I'm looking forward to it as well... the only downside is that I have no natural design ability, so it's all going to look very bland.

[TheoW]

Guess what? It's ALIVE!!!

http://thechangingmirror.com/intstory/

I just put in something quick so there was content, but it looks like it should work for now!

Two quick things.

1: All new stories need to be approved by me (which might not be instant)
2: If you add a new page a story, the page will be locked to you for about an hour. That way two people can't come in and try to add the same page.

Go, break it!

[Alice]

I noticed two issues.

First, right now, each page currently is locked. Either someone's adding new pages right now or the locking mechanism has a problem.

Second, typo: you have it as "pervious page" instead of "previous page".

[greinskyn]

Well... Technically if it is broken then it isn't impervious, so by default that would make it a pervious page! LOL

[phaldus]

More to the point, there's the bad 'perv-ious' pun.

[snapplepapple]

I'm not an expert or anything, but I've used PHP and a MySQL database for about 8 years for various sites (oh dear, has it been that long...), so if I can be of help, I'm here.

[TheoW]

The locking is working correctly, it's just not designed right. I set it up to lock the page as soon as you go to it, the problem is that it looks like the bots are getting to the pages first! I'll have to make a page in the middle where you have to go through a form before you can start editing. Should be pretty easy and should keep it from being accidentally locked.

As for the spelling errors... I suck at spelling.

[TheoW]

I'm not an expert or anything, but I've used PHP and a MySQL database for about 8 years for various sites (oh dear, has it been that long...), so if I can be of help, I'm here.

Thanks, I may have to pick your brain then.