BabbleMUD online building

# BabbleMUD internal online building system

## Getting started

To use the editor, go to the site and port for the web server. From the main menu choose the "building" option (edit.php).

You will see a combo-box: "Edit ..." (Edit new thing).

From that, choose what you want to edit (eg. spells, rooms, whatever), and click on the "Edit new thing" button.

## Choose an item to edit, or create a new one

You can now do one of three things:

- Search for an item
- List all items
- Create a new item

### Search

To search, select the field to search (eg. description) and enter a regular expression to match against it in the "search" box. Then click "Search". This will find all matching records.

A detailed description about regular expression syntax is at: http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/regexp.htm

For simple cases, just enter a word to match (like "heal") and it will be located anywhere in the selected field. To make the search case-insensitive, put "(?i)" at the start of the expression (eg. "(?i)heal" would search for "heal", "Heal", "HEAL" etc.).

You can specify alternatives, like "heal|cure" which would match either word.

Any matching items will be shown in a list, click on the hyperlink to view/edit it.

### List all

Click this to view all items, currently limited to a maximum of 200. If the one you want is not in the list, and 200 are listed, try searching for the one you want.

### New

This creates a new item of the selected type (eg. a new spell). At this stage you are given a blank editing window to enter the data. Nothing has been added to the MUD yet until you click on the "Add" button.

## Editing an item

Once you have chosen an existing item from the list (or clicked on "new" to create a new one) you will see the "item edit" page. There you can fill in all the appropriate fields for the item, and click "Add" (for a new item) or "Change" (for an existing item) to commit your changes.

Many fields will have hints shown underneath, such as:

- Required field - this must be entered (ie, not be blank)
- Key field - for existing items this identifies the item and cannot be changed
- Regular expression - the field must be a valid regular expression

### Committing changes

Once you click "add" (for new items) or "change" (for existing items) your entry will be validated against the rules for each field.

If it passes the tests you will see a message above the data (like "item updated" or "item added").

If there is a validation error you will see a big red box ("add not done" or "change not done") and then a red error message under each of the fields which need correcting. Fix them up and try again.

## Deleting items

Once you are viewing an item you can delete it by clicking the "delete" button. This will delete the item and any owned items (eg. by deleting a spell you also delete the spell effects).

You must check the "Confirm Delete" checkbox when deleting items, as it would be easy to hit "Delete" which is adjacent to "Change" accidentally.

## Duplicating items

To assist you to make something similar to an existing item, you can select an existing item, and then click "duplicate". This will make a copy of it, which you can then edit. The copy is not actually added until you click the "add" button after making any necessary amendments to the copy.

Note that duplicated items are "shallow copies". That is, duplicating a spell will only duplicate the core spell, not any owned effects.

Internal web server written by Nick Gammon.