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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

You can make the name attributes of a form element part of an array with php.

your html:

<input type="text" name="defs[1][name]" value="definition name one" />
<input type="text" name="defs[1][value]" value="definition value one" />

<input type="text" name="defs[2][name]" value="definition name two" />
<input type="text" name="defs[2][value]" value="definition value two" />

----
server side:

print_r($_POST['defs']);

makes:

Array (
    [defs] => Array
        (
            [1] => Array
                (
                    [value] => definition value one
                    [name] => definition name one
                )

            [2] => Array
                (
                    [value] => definition value two
                    [name] => definition name two
                )

        )
)

If you want to speed up Mark's way, lose the double quotes and use singles. Singles aren't checked for internal variables, so will parse faster.

$MyArray = new array();
$MyArray['id'] = $id;
$MyArray['name'] = $name;
$MyArray['value'] = $value;

or even go for :

$MyArray=array();
array_push($MyArray, $id, $name, $value);

if you don't need keys to be named.

M.

yes, so long as you escape things properly.

$w='somevar';
echo"
<input type=\"text\" name=\"defs[$w][name]\" value=\"\" />
";

M.

haha never mind - we all have lapses!

M.

Hold up, i'm being useless again.

looking good mini! you might want to widen those inputs though :D

CSS is your friend:

input {
          width : 200px;
}

M ;-)

Make sure that the attributes (name, value, title etc) are all enclosed in double quotes, not singles.

<input type='text' name='foo' /> != good

<input type="text" name="foo" /> == good

M.

Yeah - it's invalid HTML. It'll take your browser longer to render, and won't make any pages validate. If possible it's better to write valid code, because it avoids silly bugs and makes cross-browser compliance a whole lot better.

M.

in your php, change all double quotes to single, that will make everything within those quotes literal

doesnt php use single vs double as some way of working out whether it needs to evaluate something? Though i suppose thats not really an issue.

Hmm, the css hasnt done exactly what i want but i suppose its looking a bit better.
I fixed my double quotes too.
Now should i carry on doing this and working revisions etc into it or is someone gonna implement marks considerably better edit on the spot idea?

not atall. http://www.badassg.me.uk/lussumo/dictionary.phps It's my usual messy and poor if-it-does-the-job-leave-it trick. But hey! I also borrowed a couple of lines from marks code because i'm lazy and it was easier than looking it up on php.net. I've never worked with files before.

I'll have a whack at it when I wake up and see what I can do, my php is hacktastic at best but this doesn't look to be impossible to crack into :)

I haven't looked yet, but can you or mark confirm the method in which vanilla writes out to the settings.php file? is it only for the settings.php or is it a global function which can be branched off to edit other files as well?