LFE fileplanet: sort by rating / popularity / newest

[Memento]

I was thinking: when you look at LFE fileplanet, you can sort by name, author and the amount of hits. There are dozens of characters on the site, which makes it hard to find the best ones. So what do you do when you want to find the best ones? You sort by number of hits (if you know how to get to the characters list at all). However, the number of hits isn't a representive for the quality of the character!

Here's my suggestion:
- Make catagories for the characters, such as: anime; custom; based on originals
- Merge the list and the preview section. Load some more character on each page of the character preview section.
- Add the possibility to sort on rating, new-to-old (or old-to-new) and popularity (measured by recent amount of hits).

If merging the sections and making catagories to sort out the characters is too much work, adding a new way of sorting to the characters list would be fine, too. If you plan on doing this, it might be a good idea to make the characters list stand out more. How? Right now, when you click on Characters, you go to the preview immediately. Instead, you could make it so that when you click on Characters, an option 'Characters list' and an option 'characters preview' will show up in the menu and you have to choose. That way the characters list won't be overlooked so easily.


Off-topic suggestion: I think it would be smart if you'd add it to the news section when a new modification comes out.

[Silverthorn]

Okay, so, I took a look into the depths of the mainsite. After a few hours of looking, I have come to the conclusion that the page is generated according to this list:

1. User requests a url
   
2. Parameters get parsed and checked for validity
   
3. A ritual is performed in which a virgin is sacrificed to the evil demons of hell
   
4. Satan himself presents the answer to the query
   
5. The website is generated with the newly acquired infos

On a more serious note, this thing is a piece of magic. I have absolutely no clue how it works. Personally, I'd love to add the rating to the columns. However, the vote-part comes from a plugin. This makes it hard to generate content that is based on the internal database tables as well as the plugin's table. The SQL-query would be fairly easy to write but I really don't know where and how it is actually parsed, unfortunately. Sorry, but I'll have to postpone this to a much more later date (in case it ever happens)


As for your second point, I get forced to provide links at every menu entry. That is why this is made like the way it is (pretty sure that my English teacher would've lapidated me for that sentence). If you have an idea how to circumvent it in a way that it still doesn't look too forced, please tell me so!

Off-topic suggestion: I think it would be smart if you'd add it to the news section when a new modification comes out.

Eh, I guess I could do that. I just always feel like the news articles are too important for simple content-uploads... :/
If you request it though, I'll try to remember it for next time!

[Memento]

Thanks for looking into it. Of course these are just suggestions, it is yours to decide whether you will change these things or not. If you don't know how something works and therefor it will take too much time to realise it, then that's that. Perhaps someone will read this topic and provide you with the knowledge that you need, I don't have it unfortunately.

As for the news section, again, it is yours to decide what does and what doesn't go there. I think it would be a good idea if it were to be added to the news section, but I'm only one guy. Perhaps it's best to get some more opinions on this.

[Silverthorn]

Thanks for looking into it. Of course these are just suggestions, it is yours to decide whether you will change these things or not.

Your suggestions are highly sought after, imho. They make sense and I'd actually like them realized as well. Too bad that the obstacles are a little high for me at the moment

As for the news section, again, it is yours to decide what does and what doesn't go there. I think it would be a good idea if it were to be added to the news section, but I'm only one guy. Perhaps it's best to get some more opinions on this.

Hope you don't mind me butchering your first post to make a poll out of it



tl;dr: people, go vote on the poll

[Silverthorn]

1. User requests a url
   
2. Parameters get parsed and checked for validity
   
3. A ritual is performed in which a virgin is sacrificed to the evil demons of hell
   
4. Satan himself presents the answer to the query
   
5. The website is generated with the newly acquired infos

I investigated on this list once more. More precisely, I took a look into the ancient scriptures in the hope of modifying the ritual. What I figured out is that it is, indeed, possible to add ratings to the list and hence have been implemented now! See here, for example.

Sorting the list is, in theory, possible. However, due to the way the database structure is set up, this proves to be much more beasty (essentially, I'm calling the SQL-sort function over at least 3 levels of abstraction. The functions available to me only accept a name for the column; what's needed is the following: go to a different table (

SELECT t

is not supported by these functions), build the quotient of two columns (

x/y

is not supported) and sort the quotient accordingly (

expr AS quotient

is not supported)). Essentially, I'd have to restructure the whole article-table to gain access to this sorting. And honestly, I still haven't fully understood how it works :p

[Silverthorn]

ALRIGHT FELLAS, TIME TO REJOICE! I WORKED SOMETHING OUT (READ: HACKED SOMETHING TOGETHER) WHICH ALLOWS YOU TO SORT LISTS BY RATING! THAT'S RIGHT, YOU CAN NOW SORT BY RATING! GET HYPED AND CHANGE YOUR PANTS!

FRIGGIN EXAMPLE-PAGES:
http://lf-empire.de/lfe-fileplanet/chara...cters-list
http://lf-empire.de/lfe-fileplanet/backg...round-list
http://lf-empire.de/lfe-fileplanet/versions

[Rhino.Freak]

Awesome!
While you're working on that, I have 2 suggestions:
1. http://prntscr.com/9r7sa7 -- I highly doubt this is how it's supposed to look?
2. The first click makes it from Top to Bottom and second click makes it Bottom to Top. Can it be the other way round?

[Silverthorn]

1. http://prntscr.com/9r7sa7 -- I highly doubt this is how it's supposed to look?

Definitely not! I guess it's related to how browsers handle the css-zoom-tag. I removed it for now (which is why the stars are so large now), please tell me if that fixed it.

2. The first click makes it from Top to Bottom and second click makes it Bottom to Top. Can it be the other way round?

I investigated on this a bit. The default ordering is "sort by published date, descending". Any click on the column headers results in the command "sort by {column}, ascending". This makes sense to get an instant alphabetical search for title and author, not so much for hits and rating (and published date to some extent). According to my understanding, it wasn't meant to be altered anyways and judging by how hidden it is, I don't think it's going to be easy to alter the first-sorting-click on a column-wise basis :/

[Rhino.Freak]

Aha, well np then! It's still cool.

And yes the stars are fixed (they huge though).