[WIP] PA Community Hub

Quite happy with how this is turning out. The type of content (eg., the content store it belongs to) is shown in a strip along the bottom of the tile. The colour of the strip is specified by the content store. The Icons can be anything and any colour, but will turn greyscale when the content is disabled. The name of the content will also turn grey, and the enabled indicator, the round circle, will turn into a hollow grey ring (reference Settings). The content description (and other stats, once I've put them in) appear on hover (reference Community).

You can click anywhere on the tile to enable/disable the content. Intially loaded plugins (specified in the PAhub config file) are considered "core", and cannot be disabled, although this isn't currently represented in the view. These are the content Hub and Plugin Store, loaded in that order.

I plan on replacing the store tabs seen in the picture (Plugin, Mod) with a more generic filter system. I also plan to have different views, so you can chose between these tiles and a more compact list.

It looks so close to done, or else I just want it already. Either is likely, I am just so eager, I am patient as well however as I am just glad this is coming. This and player serverside are things worth any amount of waiting to eventually get

So I just implemented filters for the content hub. Can support multiple filters, and each filter can be a different type (eg., "match", where it looks for an exact match, "contains", where it checks if an array has a given value, "text", which is for partial text matches), and more can be easily added if need be. All this in about 15 minutes.



By golly I love knockout. That took me a long time doing it "by hand" in javascript for PAMM.

Also, ignore the fact that all text is the same font for now. I'll be doing a design doc before I knuckle down the css to ensure consistency.

Oh, and the Mod Store can read PAMM's modinfo.json as they are; so it will happily work with the existing mods without them needing any modification.

hmmmmm raevn idk if you would accept it, but could i donate some moneys to you just for your time in making this? cause this has me more excited then the 1.0 release did.

I very much appreciate the offer But I don't think it's right for me to accept anything, and especially not before I've released.

Happy to discuss further, but lets take this to PM.

Well I was also going to ask is it possible to put donation buttons on mods to donate to the makers to help them with development and also like pastats and it's server cost?

My immediate reaction is that this isn't wise. It adds a lot of responsibility to the tool to ensure security and accuracy, and many people could also perceive that PAHub has a duty to ensure the mods/other content is to a certain standard fit for donating to.

But once the core functionality is downpat, this should be revisited, as I'd like to hear what people think. For my part, setting aside the above issues, I personally find donate buttons (not the idea of donating, but just having visible buttons) to be somewhat tacky.

yea, they are pretty tacky. i was just thinking since some modding groups have put in 100-1000+ hours into there work and it would be amazing to donate to that team or person.

Much better filter functionality. Each filter group can be configured to toggle (each filter being able to turn on/off independently), or set (one filter active at a time). Currently, multiple selections within a group are ANDed, but I will be adding an option for ORing as well - AND makes sense for Categories, but not content types, as they only ever have one, so an OR would be more useful.

In the screenshot above, I have the in-game & ui filters active, and I'm hovering over the chrono-cam filter. I can calculate in advance how many results you would see if a filter was turned on or off at any particular time, and this is displayed when you hover over a filter. I can make them appear for all filters constantly instead of only on hover, but I found that to be too "busy.

I think it's time for a preview so we can start working on those Community Hub plug-ins. I noticed your GitHub is depressingly empty of repositories.

I should be putting it up on github soon-ish, I just spent this morning updating & uploading some of my mods (Unit Blueprint Framework, Unit Database & ChronoClick).

Note:
The api is very far from stable, so expect a lot of breakage. I'll be merciless if I think it needs changing .
There's little to no documentation, and the code "isn't the neatest" (hehe). I might post some basic templates though.

Also, the online content detection, installation & updating (and core application updating) isn't implemented yet, so you'll need to keep up-to-date manually.

Edit: Also, only windows works at present, because I haven't yet looked up the content locations for other OSs. Should be easy to add in though, as only 1 line needs to be changed.

Edit 2:
@DeathByDenim : The hub & the two core plugins (content hub & plugin store) are up on my github. I can't stress enough how pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha this is. I can't even begin to list the things that are not implemented, half implemented or just broken. Ye be warned. I'll put the remainder of the plugins I've starter (community, settings, log) up tomorrow.

A little bonus thing I implemented, in between a massive code cleanup, although there's no UI control to toggle it yet:

I'll say.

That's on Linux after modifying pahub.js to take the correct Linux path. Welp, time for me to figure out how the Chromium-debug browser stuff works.

Does it write out a log? Check PA_DATA_DIR/pahub/pahub-log.txt

Bit empty still or am I missing something ?
Can't wait to add the tournament calendar and news into it.

From the list of completed resources, looks like you are missing the plugin store - did you install that also?

Even with that though, that's pretty much all I've put up at the moment, though I have added the Log viewer plugin. I'll be putting up the Community plugin later today, with Settings and the mod store to go up at some point also.
If you have installed the plugin store, take a look at the log file to see why it can't load it - it's saved in PA_DATA_DIR\pahub\pahub-log.txt

Make sure that if you update or install any plugins or the hub itself, that you update all of them to their latest versions from their repo.

FYI the community plugin has a news feed & API for adding news from within the Hub, or news can also be added via a web request as well.

Ah, neat! Yeah, I messed up the installation of the plugins. I simply did a git clone in the plugin dir, which resulted in it creating the directory "com.pahub.content.plugin.store.plugin/com.pahub.content.plugin.store.plugin". The first one is made by the clone command and the second comes from your repository.
It works now!

Yeah all working now.



Now only to get it from our rest services and use you're pahub css style, so it looks more integrated.
If I'm done I'll do a pull request to get those tabs in the community plugin

You can add tabs to existing sections, just put the section ID ("section-community") in the addTab call
Having said that, the idea in my head was to have the following sections. This is open to discussion and will be flexible as people make new content:

Community

• News
• Chat (currently just the EsperNet IRC site in an iFrame, but I'd prefer to do a more customised one)
• Forum

Game / Play

• Lobby (eg., https://palobby.net/, with the ability to launch games directly from it)
• Replays
• Matchmaking
• Ladder
• Game Stats (pastats)
• Tournaments / Events (or as a separate section, depending on what functionality you had in mind, and how many tabs)

Clans

• Find / Join
• Clan-specific tabs

Information

• How to play, guides, encyclopedias etc.

Content Hub

• Ideas for content stores:
  • In-game Systems,
  • Fan art/stories
  • Individual unit mods (by having a store specifically for these, you can introduce additional functionality, such as specific filters, sorting etc., and you can also make it write a custom unit_list.json for all enabled units, bypassing the current limitation)

Help ( '?' icon in the header)

• About
• Help
• Stats

Thoughts?

Update - 29/09/2014
Edit: Download links are now available on the second post, if you are adventurous.

• Now supports loading content lists for online content
  
  
• Icons for content are now loaded from cache if available
• Inital PA Hub update check functionality
• News format change
• Logging changes
• Minor style changes
• Bugfixes
• API Change: pahub.api.content.addContentItem - new parameter 'local'

These weren't mentioned here before, but were available yesterday

• Sections & tabs can now be given an index, so they appear in a given order
• Sections can now be given a location, either in the section bar, or along the header.
• Content can now be sorted, and custom sort methods added.
  
  
• Minor style changes
  
• API Change: pahub.api.section.addSection - new parameter 'index' & 'location'
• API Change: pahub.api.tab.addTab - new parameter 'index' & 'location'
  
• Plugin available - Community
  
• Plugin available - Settings
• Plugin available - Log
• Plugin available - Content Hub
• Plugin available - Plugin Store

Other work (not yet available)

• Lots of work done on the Mod Store Plugin

Do you plan to have pahub/pach bundled with atom, ala pamm ? (I dirty tried pahub this WE out of curiosity by temporary replacing pamm app with yours)

From what I can see (images), pamm won't ultimately be integrated "as is", to fit in this new "framework", right ?
I hope it's not too much work.
Will it change the way mod are submitted / updated ? (paging current pamm master @Mereth )