User blog:Sgt D Grif/Code Overhaul

Hey there everyone, it's your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man  Sgt D Grif, and I probably scared you with the title of this blog. Yes, code can be a big, complex, scary mess, and yes overhauling (not to be confused with the TV show Overhaulin') can be a mess of the aforementioned adjectives as well. However, fret not, for this is not an immediate thing. Once the season  volume is over, attention will be diverted to remaking a lot of templates and redoing a lot of code.

You may be asking yourself, "Why do we need to fix things if they work?" Well, here's the thing... the code here barely works. While I'd prefer to not start a finger-pointing game, the majority of the troublesome code was brought in by the previous administration group. Simply put, a lot of broken things were put into place by people who didn't understand them. Thankfully, for the most part, I've been able to patch things together so that things don't horribly implode into masses of broken pages, but in all seriousness, the code and many templates are walking timebombs hinder moving forward and improving the wiki further. When the various stuff we have now is running into conflicts, adding MORE fuel to the fire simply makes more things unstable, and turns into a game of watching how fast something can not work properly. And when things do wind up breaking or glitching, the current things we have now are near-impossible to troubleshoot or fix.

The next thing you may be asking yourself is "Well what do we want to do to the code? How exactly do we want it overhauled?" To answer this, I'd like to draw everyone's attention to the navigation boxes on the bottom of pages. Yes, sure, they aren't flashy, but not only do they get the job done without being unprofessional looking, but they also have simple, sturdy code that allows for stuff to be done with them. It's simple to go to that navbox and tell it to be rounded, taller, and a different color. It's not simple to go up to say, the giant rounded rectangles on the homepage and tell them to do something. The main goal isn't to just make space-efficient, slim, professional templates. That's the side effect from making sanely-coded templates. Don't worry, the goal is to keep all the functionality we all enjoy, such as image switchers. The goal is to have those nice things not be unstable patch-jobs that break at will. By making things more simple, you gain the ability to make them more advanced, as ironic as that sounds. Case in point, my lazily  aptly named PlainOpener replaced a much more bulky template that did a similar thing, but necessitated an ugly red rounded rectangle to accompany it. Without being held down to such constraints, it was able to power things like the aforementioned navboxes. Furthermore, if it turns out "Oh hey we need a giant red oval of doom", it's much simpler to simply add one in on a case-by-case basis as needed, rather than have to try to get rid of them on every other case.

So, "Why is Grif telling us all of this?" The simple reason is, it'd be MUCH better if I didn't single-handedly rebuild and recode everything. Not only would it well... suck for me, but it wouldn't do any good for you guys. That's why I'm bringing this up now, so that you folks can see if you can begin trying to make heads or tails out of wiki coding now, so that you can help out when the time comes, rather than scramble to figure out how everything works at the last second! The more people we have who can understand and build upon code, the more we can improve upon and add to this wiki! Plus, it also means that if something needs doing, it's more likely that you guys can get it done instead of waiting around for me to pop up and hopefully be able to figure it out. I mean, the last thing we need is for me to sound like some evil egomaniac that controls all the code.

This blog has been brought to you in part by a lack of sleep. Remember, when possible get a good night's sleep. Otherwise you write weird blogs like this that could have been probably condensed into much shorter things. But on the flip side, this might wind up being the most amusing thing some of you have read so far today. At the very least, it might have gotten a chuckle... or a "If I was in a chat room, I'd type lol at this!" reaction. Plus, some boring ol' blog saying "Learn to code, we're going to replace a lot of stuff." just wouldn't be as inspiring as this. I'll be back with updates and more specific information as we approach the end of the volume. (Unless we wind up on a roll and get stuff done one random night.)

TL;DR Version:
 * Code and templates here need to be redone
 * Sgt D Grif wants your help
 * The end of the volume is around when we'll start