Category: Documentation

Last Updated on Wednesday, 10 December 2014

Written by y(oYo)

You are NintAndBox.net!

Nintendo boxes library could not exists without your help, you fellow contributors. So thank you all who believe in this crazy project.
Many thanks to Mimix and his unconditional commitment in the website management and the forum moderation.
Thanks to m0nsieurL for his bulk work for the logo, as well as Tony, Raven Basix, and (yet) Mimix for all your tries which have unfortunately not been kept.
And finally, thanks to Clement, who gave me a good shot to bring this website to a whole new unsuspected quality level.

But it's also...

Completely invisible to you, visitors and members, there's under the website hood a bunch of essential Web technologies.
The heart of NintAndBox.net is based on several key software components, all Open Source (that's good!)

Joomla 2.5 is the "engine" of the site. The solid foundation under everything NintAndBox.net relies on.
This is a very popular CMS (Content Management System), open source and supported by a huge and active developers community around the globe.

Remository is a component for Joomla that can manage the downloading of files. Initially very generic, it can handle any type of files. I twisted it in all directions to make it specific to our boxes library needs.

AngularJS is a web Framework by Google's empire (one among many).
On this website, it is used to display the games lists and allow to filter them upon multiple criteria simultaneously. For example it is possible to filter all American boxes with an english text, or to filter all Japanese manuals that are perfectly restored, etc.
The games lists are generated in pure JSON, displayed and controlled by Angular in real time, upon choosen filters.
Of course we use here only a small piece of this awesome library, whose potential is much higher (until the day Web Components will generalize but hey that's another story).

Bootstrap, the reference UI Web Framework created by Twitter, is used in the Joomla template of this website. It allows to build consistent web interfaces, elegant and fashion trendy, obviously in html5.
I could not wait for the next Joomla version (which will integrate Bootstrap by default) to use this little gem of technology since right now.

PlUpload component is the magic heart under the drop files zone.
It lets you upload all your files on the website, taking advantage of the wonderful new Html5 APIs. Drag and drop files from your file explorer to the drop files zone is possible, and file size is no longer a problem since it smartly sends piece by piece to reconstruct your file on server side. PlUpload also cleverly manages several "runtimes" and automaticaly loads the Flash version for older browsers, and the Html5 version for newer ones like Chrome and Firefox.

No longer need to introduce PhpBB3, a forum system which runs flawlessly since its inception.
After more than 10 years of existence, it has become the free forum reference solution for communities creation worldwide.

JFusion is a fundamental Joomla component in website's operation. If taken separately, Joomla and PhpBB systems can live completely independently. Each maintains its own users list, each having its own way to handle accounts. And this is where JFusion spreads his magic!
Rather than force you to create two accounts, one for the website (based on the Joomla CMS) and one for the forum (PhpBB) JFusion acts as a glue between the two worlds.
So that when you create your account on the website, JFusion creates a forum account for you. When you connect to the website, JFusion will automatically connect you to the forum. Pretty handy huh?

During the first development phase, I choosed the SVN configuration management system, which I mastered quite well, and that allowed me to start the project quickly. But that was before!
Having tamed the so particular and fabulous Git system, it quickly became obvious. Create and monitor new features development has never been so efficient and accurate.

jQuery and Mootools extend the JavaScript language to make it fun and finally handy. This is the kind of JavaScript Frameworks just obvious. Unfortunately MooTools is somehow less used as judged more complicated than jQuery, it is gently pushed out from the Joomla project, perhaps  jQuery power is all that is needed after all (MooTools can do what jQuery does, and a lot more, but not vice versa).

And finally, a firework of various technologies and tools that have also been used in NintAndBox.net.
Here's an uncomplete list:

• PHP5 language on server side (where the website is physicaly hosted), and the winning HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript on client side (the web browser).
• Google Analytics to analyse website visits.
• Aptana development environnement, which is a special Eclipse RCP distribution lovely adapted to PHP web projects.
• jQuery plugins in a mess...
• My good old Synology NAS, always up and running to host the development version.
• And all technologies I forgot, because hey, developments have lasted almost a year!