Question Latest Articles doesn't show Silver Ghost 3?

The Latest Articles Bar on the right of my screen doesn't show "Silver Ghost, Golden Angel"?

Strange, mine does although it has been moved down by later repostings including "Like a Brick", "Ultimate Disguise", "Revelations", and "Baker's Dozen". Interestingly, despite that "Holiday Season" is still the top post (at this time).

I don't have it either. Last night I had to have a friend email me the link to get it.

I have had both of these problems at separate times.

It would be nice, though, if we could get links to the stories in their respective announcement posts.

Unless there is a specific reason you've avoided that?

Kristin Darken wrote: Yes, because a significant advantage to a CMS is that you don't use internal links to reference content. I can 'flip a switch' at any time and completely rebuild the article database to optimize it (or make it more secure) and that can change the specific filenames that the articles are referenced by... links would have to be repaired manually, while using modules properly would still give you access to the exact articles.

That's reason for a bit of concern, considering that we have been updating the Wiki to point to the new addresses, and a site maintenance can potentially change all of 200+ links. Is there any sort of permalink functionality in this CMS? And if so, how do we find the permalinks for the stories?

Or a way for the wiki to tap into the CMS linking system so that the wiki links change when the site does?

Alternatively, is there a way to create a "master list" of links in the Wiki so that when the links do change, the wiki only needs to be updated in one place rather than crawling through the entire site fixing all the pages? (This is really a question for the wiki people, not Kristin.)

Arcanist Lupus wrote: Or a way for the wiki to tap into the CMS linking system so that the wiki links change when the site does?

Alternatively, is there a way to create a "master list" of links in the Wiki so that when the links do change, the wiki only needs to be updated in one place rather than crawling through the entire site fixing all the pages? (This is really a question for the wiki people, not Kristin.)

Those 200+ links are from the Wiki story pages to the stories, easy to find tedious to change. Internally in the Wiki links go to the Wiki Story page, which has the external link to the story.

For example Diane probably has 70 or so story parts that have to be linked from the Wiki.

Valentine wrote:

Arcanist Lupus wrote: Or a way for the wiki to tap into the CMS linking system so that the wiki links change when the site does?

Alternatively, is there a way to create a "master list" of links in the Wiki so that when the links do change, the wiki only needs to be updated in one place rather than crawling through the entire site fixing all the pages? (This is really a question for the wiki people, not Kristin.)

Those 200+ links are from the Wiki story pages to the stories, easy to find tedious to change. Internally in the Wiki links go to the Wiki Story page, which has the external link to the story.

For example Diane probably has 70 or so story parts that have to be linked from the Wiki.

Oh, good.

It's always nice to see things done intelligently.

Kristin Darken wrote: Ya, Sir Lee... that's one of the reasons/concerns I had early on and was talking about the values of using a built in wiki instead of leaving things at Wikia. Are there ways to tie into the system to prevent that sort of problem if the alias naming system is turned on for security reasons? Well... no. Obviously that would defeat the purpose of having it as a security option if an external site had a way to maintain outside links direct to content. One of the reasons the feature exists is to cut off external redirects/use of content from our site on another site (mainly for sites with photo archives that run into bandwidth issues as other sites use their archives instead of having copies).

Most hosting companies control panels have the option to set up hotlink protection, with explicit permission for a site to hotlink. You could turn it on and allow the wikia site to link via that. This controls sites linking to your content for complete display on their site, but allows links to the content on this site for display on this site. ( drives traffic to here to view content )

What the wiki is doing is the latter, a link in the wiki to open a window / tab with this site and the desired content.

Just a note: I don't think Wikia were the ones who scraped the entire wiki and attempted to sell it in book form. AFAIK, it was some third-party sleazeball, and they got away with it because the Wikia license is pretty permissive.

I wasn't saying that the wiki would be used to display the stories Warren, the hosting account control panel setup for hotlink protection would stop that. Allowing the wiki would only guarantee that static links to whateleyacademy.net wouldn't be blocked. ( usually hotlink protection doesn't block them. )
It shouldn't be needed, unless there are or will be images on here that you ( canon authors ) are ok with the wiki displaying.

turn on the hotlink protection ( not in joomla but in the server control panel ) and don't open it to any site, wouldn't impact the wiki's links at all.

I'm of the opinion that the stability and security of the primary site are most important. The wiki is a bonus, and while the links to stories are nice, they are not necessary to its original purpose which was helping readers keep track of who is who. If we need to change things on the wiki to get it to work with the new way that the main site works, then we change the wiki.

If it comes to it, we can just link the stories to the Canon Story page, and people can scroll to the appropriate story.

Valentine wrote: If it comes to it, we can just link the stories to the Canon Story page, and people can scroll to the appropriate story.

Well, then you'd have to provide targeting info. As the Canon page isn't just a long thing to scroll through, it has pages too.

No, ultimately Kristin is right; the official site always comes first.
It would be NICE to have some way to point directly to the stories, like a permalink, but if it is not really NECESSARY. If the links get broken due the needs of the site, either maintenance or to deter external hotlinkers, then they get broken.
We can work around it. If it is a once-in-a-blue-moon thing like it is happening right now due to the software change, we can fix it, by hand if necessary.
I'm still learning the ways of the bot, I might even figure some way to semi-automate the process in the future (maybe download the list of stories page, preprocess it in a text editor to extract the relevant information and put it in a format that AutoWikiBrowser can digest...)
If it the needs of the main site mean it becomes too frequent for that, well, as Baby Valentine pointed out, we can always resort to pointing to the general list of stories.

The problem is that the Whateley world is a 'live' structure in what has happened in the past could be overwritten in the future. By this I mean is what had happened with the old site. And not by choice, it was thrust upon them. Many, many pieces of info was lost, misplaced or overwritten.

The 'Wiki' site is, as has been stated' a 'FAN' based endeavor to help those who are new, as with old, a place to learn about characters, devices as with the Academy as with other bits of info. The problem is that when there is an upheaval it gets messy in what needs to be updated and so forth.

I don't think its up to those that maintain the Whateley Universe to maintain 'both' this and the other site and I applaud what Sir Lee as well as others behind the scene are doing.

This is even true for other 'Fan' based sites such as Harry Potter, The Wheel of Time, The Foundation Series and so forth. But for most they have become a 'semi' live area in that the books have been written and so its easier to place relevant info without much change. That isn't the case with 'Whateley' as new characters are brought in as with writers and old ones move on.

The problem is that is what is not most apparent: the 'structure' of the Fan based Wiki is that its own structure will change with the given times. By adding 'links' to stories it could become bloated with broken ones as with irrelevant info. Thus the reason to have to maintain it as well. This is not a put down but a known fact that has occurred to many fan based sites as well as web sites. How many have clicked on a link only to find it not working and the administrator 'never' got around or bothered to update them or to visit a website only to find that it to has been abandoned for various reasons.

Now if this sounds like a rant, its not as those who are trying to maintain the Wiki site are also doing a learning curve. Many have taken up the mantel to keep it going as they to learn structures and so forth as they to maintain a RL. They have to work from the hip as they say when new content is brought out and it can be a challenge. In today's fast pace world we forget the learning curve that goes behind the scene. It doesn't take a day, a week, not even a month to learn what needs to be done. Its constant as with having to learn 'again' when a site decides to update itself with newer software, thus breaking all that had been done before.

Of course there will be those that 'leave' for various reasons, be it a real life situation, tired of the hassle or the worse. The worst is that if its someone with the 'knowledge' of how the site was structured it could be detrimental and I'm not looking for 'ill will' just a point made.

Worse is that newer software will be introduced that will 'change' the whole structure once more and break those many links.

Where am I going with this? Its that I'm thankful for what those are doing on both sites, give it time, don't expect resolve within a week, month or maybe even half a year. People have real lives to live and let those that write to entertain do so. Its not a put down. I wish we 'could' hire someone to maintain the two sites but I don't really foresee that happening. That is unless someone wins the lottery and wouldn't mind sharing.

I'll be patient and when the time comes I'll point out certain links, color mismatch and so forth when warranted. As its been said, it'll be a bumpy ride for now as the road is repaved and the underworkings are once more repaired. Given how fast Kristin and the others had brought this site to life after the last one, I'm thankful for that. She as with the others could have waited longer before allowing us in.

So kudo's to those as with Kristin and Warren.

Point. What we CAN do Wiki-side is to plan for better maintainability, so changes can be done in one place instead of having to be propagated over hundreds of places. There are several things we can do in that direction, mostly by leveraging redirects, which I have been thinking about. I'm probably going to put up a "recommended practices" page when I have time to work on it (probably over the end-of-year holidays).

Aren't we all just borrowing trouble here?

It's possible Kristin might have to turn on a security feature she isn't using at the moment and it might mean the Wiki links to the stories break!

How about we deal with it then? if we need to?

That's exactly what we will do, if and when. But we have choices every day in how to do things, and there is usually one way that is less vulnerable to this sort of problem than another.

For instance: a long time ago, we chose to, for most pages, not to link wiki references to stories to the story itself; instead, we link to a wiki page ABOUT the story, and THAT page has the external link to the story. It was a GOOD choice. Now that the stories are being moved, we have just one or two places to fix it instead of dozens. If we had kept linking directly to the stories from pretty much everywhere, this migration would have been a nightmare for the Wiki team. That's the sort of planning I'm talking about.

IF permalinks were an option, we would prefer to start using them instead of less-stable URLs. But they are not an option, and Kristin warned us that links MAY change in the future, so we will keep looking for ways to reduce the "failure surface" of the wiki/site interface.

Right now we have two links per story file (one from the story page, one from the List of Canon Stories), which is WAY better than, say, fourteen; but we could still consider options for reducing that to one link per story file (I see two possible approaches, there might be more).

Some of the considerations that this discussion triggered in my mind, in fact, are NOT related to the main site at all, but are intended to ease long-term maintainability of the wiki itself. It's just planning things now (and perhaps investing a bit of work in the short term) so we have less work to do in the long term.