Personal Video Database

If I was him I would want to maintain control over how it was presented to the public...

That's fine, and he will always be the ultimate authority. But expecting the exercise of that control will have any particular positive outcome is like expecting to be able to herd cats. Cats, however, can be led. But I'm not even suggesting it's up to nostra to lead. This is his hobby, which I assume he expects to enjoy without undue stress, and it hopefully comes after his family, friends and real job. Perhaps the most important leadership should coming from the users—to ensure we are collectively acting in a way that ensures our developer is not overwhelmed with things that need to be "controlled," and is having too much fun to ever wonder whether his efforts are worthwhile.

Not sure what determines if a pages is added to the contents or not.

That's an optional feature cwdean is working on. The layout of pages in the form of a manual (or book or whatever) has to be configured manually. All the system can do is put the pages in alphabetic order (or hits, date modified, etc).

Rick, this is great - thanks for sharing.

You're welcome. It was painful, but I figured it was my turn.

Just wondering, do you mainly use allmovies for your metadata?

I use both IMDb and allmovies together—usually run in a batch. IMDb goes first, because it is generally more complete. I let it handle all the people. You can see from my documentation where I use allmovie data to overwrite standard fields which may have been populated by the IMDb plugin. The rest goes into custom fields. As you probably know from doing this yourself, my approach in modifying the script was just to grab whatever I could from the stuff listed in the right-hand column of the page. I do actually have all those custom fields in my database, but only for the sake of being complete. The data elements I appreciate most are the Synopsis and Review (my original reason for going to allmovies), Tones (which I find gives a really good indication of how a movie feels), and perhaps Attributes. The rest is nice to have, but not critical.

My preferences and my skin design probably feed off each other. With that in mind, I'll attach some screenshots so you can see what I mean. We don't yet (as of 0.9.9.4) have the ability to change the placement of custom fields—they're still just dumped into the custom section of the skin. This is why I'm very deliberately placing some allmovie data into standard fields—so I can place them where I want them in my skin. Also, you may note most of the list data goes into Multiselect list fields, even thought they may look better as List or String fields. This is because I don't care so much about looking at them—I'd rather have them take up less space, and be used primarily as a means of grouping.

When I was doing this before, I suppose it got a bit unwieldy. Redoing the script, however, forced me to rethink what I was doing and why. Now it seems to work quite well. I do have to make sure my Overwrite field settings are correct—and stay that way. That can be nuisance when a plugin or script is used for more than one thing (e.g., movies and series). BTW, I think I have nostra partially committed to implementing my fix for that in version 2.0.

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Looks like I've somehow stirred up a hornet's nest.

Hey, we're movie buffs. Today it's drama, tomorrow it's comedy... 

As for the rest of your post, I agree completely. I appreciate both your intent, and all the effort you've put into this.

I'm not sure about the Tikipedia theme (except for the logo, of course )—while more pleasing overall, I wonder if it will be more difficult because the details don't stand out as well. How do you find it from a maintenance point-of-view? Are all the same features there? Does it require a lot of things to be changed so it works?

Having two wikis is definitely not practical.

The issue is bigger than that. I've always been amazed that you're able to service two user groups, making each feel they are "it"—to the point of each forgetting the other exists. But what's happening now is clearly a symptom of this "two worlds" approach. One of the most important purposes of a user-created-and-maintained wiki was to remove that burden from you. Now you're slipping toward the role of referee between groups of feuding geeks who can't even talk to each other.

You might hope this will be resolved by your decision as to which wiki to use. But I think there are two better choices. One is to continue with the "two worlds" approach, and let each user group do its own thing. The other is to find some way to get the two groups communicating, and ask them to work out their differences. I prefer the second approach, especially considering building a truly international wiki reminds us all our "world" is not the only one, and gets everyone focused on communication/translation issues.

I have to wonder... If we were one group using one forum in one language, would the result be the same? I don't think so. I can't imagine anyone reading cwdean's introduction to the wiki and responding, "Bullshit! Your engine sucks, your site is slow and your wiki will never be what I want it to be—so I'm going to make my own! BTW, may I have your content?" But that's not what happened. As far as I can tell, the Russian group was not given that introduction, nor were they given an opportunity to discuss the implementation of a wiki ahead of time. Neither were users here, but that's beside my point —which is this situation could have been avoided with a little trust and communication.

Now I don't know if this line of reasoning is going anywhere near a practical solution. I certainly do not want you spending any time on it (BTW, when will 0.9.9 be finished?). But perhaps there's a user who is fluent in Russian and English who would be willing to facilitate some communication between the two groups. They could be a moderator of a forum in which they provide a translation of each message. I don't know if this is an option in SMF, but it might be the type of forum where nothing is posted until it is "approved" by the moderator (in this case, in order to add the translation). It would also be nice if SMF could be configured to display or mirror one forum on the two boards. Otherwise, the moderator would have to repost all original messages to the other forum. A moderator could easily be overwhelmed with this sort of arrangement. But it might work if there were limits placed on topics discussed, and perhaps on the number of posts (although requiring moderator approval would put a damper on that).

Now here's an irony: Another long-winded post for you to deal with when you should be coding. Maybe you can Google Translate it, post it on the Russian board, and let them deal with it.

Now adds current date to Updated field.

The updated script is attached to my original message above.

And now back to my questions...

Is a date function available? I would like to be able to save the current date in a custom Date updated field.

Now that I'm running out of new things to add, I'm eyeing the Similar Works section (under Plot Synopsis). Is it possible to grab that list and add the movies to PVD's Connections (as a separate section, I suppose)—or is that beyond the scope of a script?

One of them has already a DokuWiki set up.

Oh, well. Maybe the competition will help.

Hmmm... Maybe that's why Reset is cranking-out page translations at an astonishing rate!

How is this going over with our Russian friends? Perhaps we should have assumed they would feel the same about an English wiki as we would about a Russian. That is, fine—as long as it behaves/performs pretty much the same in our native language—otherwise—we may as well do our own. It appears they are actively translating your pages, so maybe they're happy. Since the wiki will maintain pages in multiple languages, I don't suppose that's the issue. But is the quality of the Russian interface acceptable?

A few things I've noticed...

When I log in, the Babelfish section disappears and is replaced with "Babelfish (debug): Fatal error."

The translation links don't include the option to translate to English. I suppose that's logical—it's recognizing the default language is English, so there should be no need to translate to English. But what if I want to translate a Russian page to see if there's something there I might want to add to the English page (I'm sure those guys have cool tips they're not sharing with us!). My workaround for this is to use the following bookmarklet to send the page to Google Translate.

javascript:location='http://translate.google.com/translate?u=' + encodeURIComponent(location);

My default language is English...so I'm unable to test a lot of this.

Hopefully, there will soon be new pages in Russian only that we will need to translate into English. That should give us some idea. The part we can't experience is the quality of the Russian (or other non-English) interface. BTW, if one doesn't understand English, how do they register and change the interface language to their own? Maybe changing the default language to Russian for a time would make a good test.

I can assure you that you can install PVD wherever you want, and, if a valid script with a PSF extension is placed in the \Scripts subfolder of that directory, it will be recognized by the program.

QED. Although running it from the desktop is a rather extreme demonstration. 

I don't know why you had a problem over-writing the old script with the new one. If you had used Explorer in detail view, however, you could have easily seen which was which (perhaps Windows changed the extension, so it wouldn't have to overwrite the existing file). Then it would have been a simple matter to delete the old file, and rename the new one. The point of my earlier rant was, in a misguided attempt to make things "easier," Vista obscures straightforward information you need to know and understand in order to maintain your system properly.

I have poor vision, but I live and learn.

Are you aware of the "full page zoom" feature in the current versions of Firefox, Opera and IE? Using that, you can enlarge everything (i.e., images and graphics—like an attachment icon—as well as text). In Firefox, Ctrl++/Ctrl+- enlarge/reduce, or you can put icons on a toolbar to do so.