Playeraid.net modules

If you enjoy the handy player aids found on https://playeraid.net and you'd like to contribute, these are some basic instructions to get you started.

IMPORTANT: This is currently an alpha level implementation. Many features will likely be added in the future, and some things in this document will change.

Necessary Skills

There are a few things you will need to know to get started.

• The best/easiest/highly recommended way to submit your contributions is through github here. If you've used it at all, there is workflow of: fork a repository, make edits, submit a pull request. This is the easiest for me to process/test. However, if github is a little intimidating, you can just zip up your directory and email a Dropbox (or similar) link to it for me (admin@splitstreams.com) to get it from you. Please don't send it as an attachment.
• You will need to understand the basic concepts of construction of a YAML file, specifically PyYAML. There are many tutorials on the internet covering YAML, but this one covers the very basics. It also has some other helpful links at the bottom of the page. Alternatively, you can use JSON instead of YAML, but it's a little more finicky to use and make valid.
• You will either need to know some basic HTML, or Markdown. Markdown is recommended for simplicity. Note that you cannot (currently) mix HTML and Markdown. Even though Markdown supports inline html, I'm not currently allowing it. If you need to do some formatting that falls outside Markdown, use HTML.
  • If you are using HTML, you will want to use basic tags like <p> tags, <b> tags, <i> tags, and maybe list (<ol> and <ul>). You are only using these tags for some basic output formatting. You don't have to be any kind of html expert here.
  • If you are using Markdown, I would highly recommend using the Photosynthesis player aid as an example. Note the use of text: | syntax for the multiline text blocks. This is important for markdown as the | will preserve your whitespace properly.

The best advice here is just to look through some of the existing player aids and you should be able to figure out what you need to do.

Standards and Rules

There are some things you will have to adhere to for your submissions to be used. They are pretty simple rules, and mostly obvious.

• Your YAML/JSON must be valid. There are validators out there that will test these files for validity before submission. I will test them myself upon submission, but I would ask that you make sure they are syntactically valid before submitting. You can also test them on the playeraid site. See Testing Your Module below.
• Your YAML/JSON should be easily human readable. This means you need to use indentation for sub-sections and things should line up. If you submit an unindented mess, it will be rejected.
• If you choose to use HTML, your html snippets must be well formed. This basically means that you have to close your tags. So, for example, a <p> tag needs to have its closing </p> tag. Your submission will be rejected if it is not well formed.
• <script> tags are forbidden. You cannot run any javascript from within your playeraids. There should never be a case where this is necessary.
• I use an 80 character line limit for my files, but you do not have to. I will not enforce this on anyone else. But, again, it should be properly indented and readable.
• Your directory/file names may only contain the following characters: "a" to "z" and underscore. Though multiple languages are supported in the data files themselves, the directories and files must follow this rule.

Directory Layout

Your directory should be layed out as follows:

- <The top level directory should be named for the game> example: amun_re
  - <language 1>  <- This should be named for the 2 letter language code ("en")
    - playeraid.yaml -or- playeraid.json
  - <language 2>
  - <language N>
  - img <- This is a directory that you can put images in.  You can use these images in your aids.  More on images below.

Data Layout

The layout of your data in your YAML/JSON file is pretty simple. The allowed key values in the mappings are pretty straightforward here.

The Top Level of the Data Structure

This will have the following 7 mapping items (some optional):

• name (required): This is the name that will show up on the playeraid.net home page
• description (required): This is a short description of the game. This could just be a simple link to the BGG page
• bgg_id (required): This is ID of the game from board game geek. You can get this from the url for the game. e.g. 339958 is the ID for "Gutenberg" from this URL: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/339958/gutenberg
• sections (required): This will map to a list of your sections (more on sections below).
• expansions (optional): This is YAML list of expansions included in the player aid.
• yt_videos (optional): This is a YAML list of youtube videos to embed in a "videos" section. You can use a url or just the ID value from the url. The ID value from this example Youtube url, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGhHt6mDXMU, would be "AGhHt6mDXMU". If it is a url, it must be the full url, including the https:// at the beginning.
• credits (optional): If you are copying this player aid from an existing aid and wish to credit the original creator, you can specify them here. You can also add your own name if you put this aid together.
• enabled (optional): This is either true or false for whether it is enabled. You must set this to true to enable your player aid. The default is false
• version (optional): This is the version of the playeraid as a decimal number. If not supplied, the default is 1.0. Note that if it is not a valid number, your aid will end up throwing an error.
• text_type (optional): This is either html or markdown. If not specified, the default is html.

Sections

This is the meat of your player aid. Each section will have up to 3 items in it, including another sections mapping. This means you can have nested sections within sections. You can find examples of these on https://playeraid.net.

These are the 3 items that can appear in a section:

• name (required): This will appear as the heading for the section. This is the clickable portion that will open up and reveal any text or sections below it.
• id (optional): This will set the html "id" value for the section. This can be used such that you can link to it internally (see below). NOTE: This should be a single word, or multiple words separated by underscores. Do not have spaces in the id.
• text (optional): This is text that will appear directly under your section. This will contain any html snippets to format what appears in this section.
• sections (optional): In addition, or in lieu of, a text section, you can have another sections item to nest more sections. You can nest as deeply as is reasonable.

Images

In the img directory, you can add images that are referenced in your playeraid in an <img> tag. All images sources will be prepended with this path: /static/img/<name of module directory/.

Example: If your module is for Amun Re, and your directory is amun_re, then you have an image in the img directory, and that image is named image1.jpg, you would add the following html tag to your playeraid file to show that image:

<img src="/static/img/amun_re/image1.jpg" width="30" height="30" />

(Note that you can optionally specify a width and height for the image there)

For Markdown: You can also specify images, using the same path building as above. The markdown syntax is as follows (using the same path as above):

![alt text](/static/img/amun_re/image1.jpg)

Note that you cannot specify a width and height for images if you are using Markdown. You must size your images using an editor.

Internal (same page) Links

As is mentioned under Sections above, you can specify links directly to sections if the id attribute is set for the section. Then, you can just have a link directly to it as follows.

Example: If you had a section where you set the id to my_section, you could then link to it in text with either of the following.

• HTML

<p>This is some text, and this is a <a href="#my_section">link to my section</a></p>

• Markdown

This is some text, and this is a [link to my section](#my_section)

Markdown Extensions

There are a couple of non-standard Markdown extensions included on the site.

Tables

You can include tables with the following syntax.

| heading 1 | heading 2 | heading N |
| --------- | --------- | --------- |
| row 1 cell 1 | row 1 cell 2 | row 1 cell 3 |
| row N cell 1 | row N cell 2 | row N cell 3 |

There are some other options you can do in terms of alignment and such. See the documentation for other table options.

Colored Text

You can colorize chunks of text pretty simply. You can use the following syntax to colorize text.

This is some [red text]!red! in a sentence

That will end up with "red text" being colored red. Note that anything in the [] is the text portion (similar to a link) and in between the !, you can specify a color. Note that this will work with hex designations as well. The following would produce the same output:

This is some [red text]!#ff0000! in a sentence

Testing Your Module

You can test your module by entering the text here: https://playeraid.net/test

Note that this is primarily for testing the layout.

Things To Note About Testing

• Images will not work. They will appear broken
• If you are using HTML, your HTML code will not be rendered. This is to prevent exploits on the site. You'll be able to see what your layout looks like, and it will show you the escaped HTML. It's pretty easy to test HTML locally using a file:// url.
• If you are using Markdown, everything in the aid will be rendered.

Future Plans

I plan on adding in some other features to this at some point. I'm thinking that I may allow an optional css file for more individualized styling. I'm also open to suggestions if people have ideas for improving this.