I am wondering how all of you started coding plugins/mods/etc? I have never coded one from scratch, but am interested in starting. The most I have done is alter already existing plugins.
Feel free to speak about everything you've ever done, or maybe just your first project. Let us know if there was anything that helped you get started! 🙂
Here's what I did to start editing plugins to fit my websites.
The first time I edited a plugin was when I was using SMF to power my forum. I edited the shoutbox to show different colors for user ranks (for usernames in chat) and made it look nicer.
Another time I made a website powered entirely by a shoutbox. I stripped MyBB down to its member/registration system and installed a chatbox, left that too. There were no forums. The website forced users to register an account and then login to use the chatbox. It was text based. I had two versions of my modification. One version saved all of the past chat messages to the page itself so that new visitors could scroll up and see the last 100 entries, with a public log. The other version saved all of the past chat messages to a private log and cleared the index's page on each page refresh. The private log was not publicly accessible so this meant each user could only see messages sent to the chat after they loaded the homepage.
I stopped the chatbox website when a user decided to send a bot to spam the chatbox indefinitely. I could have added CAPTCHA, but decided to move on to better things.
Another cool plugin I edited was with forum cash. I set up the cash/points system to evaluate each post on the amount of letters written, as well as which section the post was made in. I also set it up to give points to a thread maker every time the thread got a reply. This encouraged users to make high quality threads that had a high chance to get replies, instead of random low quality threads that might not get good replies. Then I divided this number (cash/points) by how many posts the user made to get the average points per post. This number was used to represent each user instead of a post count.
That's really all I can come up with now. There have been smaller projects here and there, but nothing else worth mentioning.
Feel free to speak about everything you've ever done, or maybe just your first project. Let us know if there was anything that helped you get started! 🙂
Here's what I did to start editing plugins to fit my websites.
The first time I edited a plugin was when I was using SMF to power my forum. I edited the shoutbox to show different colors for user ranks (for usernames in chat) and made it look nicer.
Another time I made a website powered entirely by a shoutbox. I stripped MyBB down to its member/registration system and installed a chatbox, left that too. There were no forums. The website forced users to register an account and then login to use the chatbox. It was text based. I had two versions of my modification. One version saved all of the past chat messages to the page itself so that new visitors could scroll up and see the last 100 entries, with a public log. The other version saved all of the past chat messages to a private log and cleared the index's page on each page refresh. The private log was not publicly accessible so this meant each user could only see messages sent to the chat after they loaded the homepage.
I stopped the chatbox website when a user decided to send a bot to spam the chatbox indefinitely. I could have added CAPTCHA, but decided to move on to better things.
Another cool plugin I edited was with forum cash. I set up the cash/points system to evaluate each post on the amount of letters written, as well as which section the post was made in. I also set it up to give points to a thread maker every time the thread got a reply. This encouraged users to make high quality threads that had a high chance to get replies, instead of random low quality threads that might not get good replies. Then I divided this number (cash/points) by how many posts the user made to get the average points per post. This number was used to represent each user instead of a post count.
That's really all I can come up with now. There have been smaller projects here and there, but nothing else worth mentioning.
