Aircraft download page suggestion

[Red Leader]

Hi all,
As many of you know, you can link to specific sections of pages on the wiki (e.g., http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear#Flight_Dynamics_Models). I thought it would be a great improvement to the website if we could link to specific aircraft headers on the aircraft download page (e.g., http://www.flightgear.org/download/aircraft-v3-4/#A-10). The main usage of this would be to link to specific aircraft from infoboxes on the wiki.

To do this, an id attribute would need to be added to the headers (technically <strong> elements) above the aircraft picture on the aircraft download page.

Example:

Code: Select all

<strong id="A-10">A-10</strong>

The only problem is the filter on the aircraft download page; we need a way to either turn it off, or configure it to show all aircraft. That could be done using arguments that are then processed by JavaScript.

I hope you find my suggestion helpful.

Regards,
Red Leader

[curt]

Hi Red Leader,

This is a good suggestion. I think the reason we hesitated in the past is because we weren't sure we could unambiguously guess the wiki page link from the aircraft contents. The download page is all (or mostly) scripted so we'd really just need to figure out the best way guess the wiki page link and we could add that to the script.

Thanks,

Curt.

[Johan G]

@Curt: You may or may not have gotten Red Leader the wrong way around.

I think the reason we hesitated in the past is because we weren't sure we could unambiguously guess the wiki page link from the aircraft contents.

The main usage of this would be to link to specific aircraft from infoboxes on the wiki.

[curt]

Ok, well ... never mind then.

It has been suggested that we create links from the aircraft in the aircraft downloads page over to their respective wiki articles for more information. Perhaps links in both directions would be useful if they could be maintained in a reasonably automated way.

Thanks,

Curt.

[Hooray]

actually, we've been contemplating adding such links to the aircraft-set.xml file to ensuret that aircraft developers can easily help maintain such things, without having to violate "DRY" concepts. PropertyList tags are cheap, and can be easily processed by a server-side php/perl script, so I guess it would be better to add such things there, especially because it would be front-end agnostic, i.e could just as well be used by other front-ends, including external/internal GUIs/launchers.

[Johan G]

Perhaps links in both directions would be useful if they could be maintained in a reasonably automated way.

Indeed. I think they would be useful.

[Jabberwocky]

@Hooray, Red Leader: What about different variants of the same aircraft in different repositories? How would you handle that? Several links on the same Wiki page?