Library:Documentation

Oddworld Library is a fan site that follows the works of Oddworld Inhabitants (Oddworld, Citizen Siege, Pound Dawg, The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot) and OddMobb. This includes their releases (games, films, books, website, etc.), universe (fictional characters and places) and fan communities (fan sites, big name fans, fan art, etc.). It produces news (current and archived) and articles (encyclopedia-style) and shares media (images, video, audio, etc.).

Content

The Library hosts multiple types of content.

• Pages are primarily textual, but can incorporate forms and illustrative media.

• Artefacts are single media ‘items’, e.g. spans of text, image, video and audio files, Flash, articles, websites.

• Accounts are registered user accounts created by users, who log in to their accounts in order to make edits to the content of the Library.

• Comments are text messages left by users. The degree to which they can include other media types (links, images, etc.) is yet to be determined.

• Feeds are XML files that allow feed readers to agglomerate news articles, comments, page revisions, etc.

• Templates/plugins remain to be more clearly defined, but allow inclusion in pages of dynamic or complex material that users should not be able to edit at the front end, e.g. automatically-generating lists of pages/accounts/feeds, contact or login forms.

• There is also a Calendar, although its implementation is yet to be described. It is compatible with other calendar platforms, e.g. Google Calendar.

Pages

There are several types of pages.

• News and encyclopedia articles. Although these differ in the type of content they provide, they are virtually identical from a technical standpoint; news articles more strongly emphasize their creation date and creator.

• Navigation and support pages. For example, a table of all articles (sortable by title/age/size/etc.), or the contact form. These may not technically differ from the above, and may just rely on heavy use of plugins.

• The nature of user profiles is yet to be determined. They should provide means to send public and private messages to users and list the contributions they have made. Several registered users will have their own encyclopedia articles, suggesting that their articles should double as account profiles. This would have the effect of forcing users to register screen names that don't conflate with existing page titles or addresses.

• Every artefact and gallery will have its own page that lists details of it. Artefact pages in particular may come in both static and lightbox form, depending on viewing context. Some of these details will be plugins (image dimensions, video length, etc.) while others will be custom written (description, publication history,

• Most of the above page types will each have several meta pages that detail, for example, the revisions made to the page, the links to and from the page and the traffic generated by each, etc.

Artefacts and Galleries

Artefacts include archived official and fan- or press-created media, and the Library’s own assets. Some artefacts are articles (e.g. archived magazine articles reproduced in HTML). Some are entire websites (e.g. the Library’s capture of the First Ten Years website). In these cases, the artefact page will act something like a splash page.

Artefacts are typically embedded in articles. Strictly speaking, they are merely only embedded in their own pages. Artefact pages do not need to be individually created, they are automatically generated either when the artefact is uploaded or when its page is first accessed (TBD).

Galleries are simply collections of artefacts. They can be viewed ordered by several qualities (size, time of upload, etc.) and can have an "arbitrary" order assigned (e.g. screenshots for which no default quality matches the order they would be encountered in a game). Galleries can be nested hierarchically, i.e. all images in the ‘Molluck’ gallery and in the ‘Glukkon status’ gallery are automatically part of the ‘Glukkon’ gallery provided the galleries have been so nested.

Appearance

The appearance of Oddworld Library has yet to be decided. There are three main components.

• Graphics are being provided by Chris. Although their nature has yet to be determined, ideas for a banner, logo and/or wordmark have been discussed.