Help:Programmers

Welcome Programmers, and thank you for your help in making this site possible.

If you are looking to assist us with the BelieveTheSign project, you will first need to familiar yourself with the MediaWiki software that runs this site. MediaWiki is written in PHP and stores all data in a MySQL database.

The best way to help and to learn the ins and outs of Mediawiki is to set up a development installation of Mediawiki on your own PC. This will allow you to run a snapshot of the BelieveTheSign website locally.

Detailed information on Mediawiki is available from several sources:

1. The MediaWiki website - see section on Code & Technical Issues
2. MediaWiki users website
3. MediaWiki users forum
4. The BelieveTheSign Help Page
5. Wikipedia help - they use the same MediaWiki software that we use
6. This guy says his player is working on MediaWiki

There are other information sources as well, but these are a good start. You can write PHP hacks for MediaWiki and some of the information on how to write a hack can be found in the above links.

We currently need help with the following:

1. Embedding Audio files - Wikipedia currently allows this but I am unsure as to how they implemented it.
2. Embedding Video files - you will need to write a hack for this.
3. Embedding PDF Files - you will need to write a hack for this.
4. Design of Main page) - this will involve using the MediaWiki markup language.
5. Flash introduction - we want to put up a flash front end for the MediaWiki website on a separate subdomain.

Once you have figured out how to embed Audio, Video or PDF files, please post a message on one of the talk pages as follows:

1. Help talk:Embedding Audio files
2. Help talk:Embedding Video files
3. Help talk:Embedding PDF Files

If you want to assist with the main page, you will note that our current Main Page cannot be edited. That is why we have created a proposed main page to act as a sandbox to test out ideas and concepts. If you really want to experiment, set up your own sandbox by talking a copy of the proposed main page and perhaps we can present a few different main page ideas. All discussion regarding the Main Page should to on the talk page for the proposed main page.

If you are interested in assisting with the flash introduction, please post a message on Help talk:Flash introduction.

Hopefully by using the ability of the MediaWiki software to work collaboratively, we can all work together to get the job done.

Thanks for your help. Remember: this is the Lord's work and not that of men. We want to help get the last one in.