Chess, anyone..? The Vchess module needs maintainer(s)...

[LeeteqXV]

I am checking out if/how vChess is working under BD 1.5.x, including its dependency: "tsort.

• https://www.drupal.org/project/vchess
• https://www.drupal.org/project/tsort (dependency of vchess)

When making a draw in VChess, a WSOD is shown along the following message:

"Fatal error: Call to undefined function rules_invoke_event() in /home/<x......>/modules/vchess/vchess.pages.inc on line 391"

If one then click on the browser's back button, you are taken to the vChess board and can see that the move was indeed registered and it seems that the error did not have any effect.

I did patch the schema.inc file as described here:

Solution for ENUM datatype for MySQL https://www.drupal.org/node/1560974 https://www.drupal.org/files/core-7.x-ENUM_and_TIMESTAMP-1560974.patch

(For reference: "Remove support for date and time types" (open feature request for D7.core) https://www.drupal.org/node/866340

(The vChess installation does not give any errors or the like, but in normal usage it seems to contain so many small bugs that this module needs a thorough revision even after getting rid of the porting related issues.)

The other module, Tsort, does not cause any errors, but need to explore more of Vchess before I can say for sure.

Anyone for Chess (maintainership...) ? :-)

Aside from it being an actual interest of mine, I think it will help attract more people to BD. We should at least have one gaming module that works in the BD contrib repository. Chess is a nice addition to many types of community sites, even blogs.

[klonos]

Fatal error: Call to undefined function rules_invoke_event()

Not an expert, but this seems like a function that belongs to the Rules module: http://cgit.drupalcode.org/rules/tree/rules.module#n1018 ...I don't see Rules being defined as a dependency for VChess though: http://cgit.drupalcode.org/vchess/tree/vchess.info

Aside from it being an actual interest of mine, I think it will help attract more people to BD. We should at least have one gaming module that works in the BD contrib repository. Chess is a nice addition to many types of community sites, even blogs.

Judging from the usage count of VChess (only 23 installations at the time of writing this) and the fact that the project seems neglected (last commit was 4 years ago), I think that this does seem just as something that would just interest you and only a few others. Sorry 😛

Honestly though, I don't see how this would attract people to Backdrop. I guess just leave this issue here and see if you can get any interest. I cannot promise anything, but perhaps I might sometime give this module a go for practice as I learn more PHP. Perhaps you can try it yourself.

[klonos]

Not an expert, but this seems like a function that belongs to the Rules module: ...

...it turns that this is a known issue for VChess, reported back in 2012 but still not fixed (which is a sign of the project being abandoned). There is a user that comments the following at the last comment in that issue:

I just installed the vchess module and i had the same error in a local test site (drupal 7.23). It disappeared after i installed the rules module.

So this indeed seems like a dependency in Rules that is not mentioned in the project nor defined in its .info file.

I am sure that if you wrap the function with a if (module_exists('rules')) function, then that specific error will go away ...but then the module will most likely stop working too.

Luckily for you, the Rules module is already ported in Backdrop, so you can try and see if things work after installing it. Do let us know if it does 😉

[LeeteqXV]

On 02/01/17 09:57, Gregory Netsas wrote:

Judging from the usage count of VChess https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/vchess (only 23 installation at the time of writing this) and the fact that the project seems neglected (last commit was 4 years ago), I think that this does seem just as something that would just interest you and only a few others. Sorry 😛

Honestly though, I don't see how this would attract people to Backdrop. I guess just leave this issue here and see if you can get any interest. I cannot promise anything, but perhaps I might sometime give this module a go for practice as I learn more PHP. Perhaps you can try it yourself.

Hmm, do you base your impression about chess on interest in CMS/technical issues? Did you notice the uptick in chess interest the last 2 months, with the World Championship that finished 3 days ago?

One cannot look at Drupal to find out about the potential interest in having a chess feature on a personal web site, at least not before Drupal/BackDrop has become sufficiently interesting and tempting to attract such novice users in the first place.

There are good reasons why novice blog users are flocking to WP instead of Drupal, although even if their statistics is waaay better than Drupal's ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/chess ) regarding # of installs, their numbers are not very impressing either.

That is what I want to see whether we can change by exploring the options of basing the CMX.content.cat distributions on BackDropCMS.

When we have built something that can be presented to normal people with features they would like, which looks and works good out of the box, then we can start finding out about install numbers.

Lastly, I would like to point out that Social Media will have a "next wave" / change, which will include users controlling their online activities from 1 personal central: their own CMS site, to a much larger degree (and with much more mature solutions) than today. Features such as Chess modules will become interesting for more people as that starts to shift.

Regards, @LeeteqXV

[LeeteqXV]

On 02/01/17 10:12, Gregory Netsas wrote:

Not an expert, but this seems like a function that belongs to the
Rules <https://www.drupal.org/project/rules> module: ...

...it turns that this is a known issue for VChess https://www.drupal.org/node/1855166, reported back in 2012 but still not fixed (which is a sign of the project being abandoned). There is a user that comments the following at the last comment in that issue:

I just installed the vchess module and i had the same error in a
local test site (drupal 7.23).
It disappeared after i installed the rules module.

So this indeed seems like a dependency in Rules https://www.drupal.org/project/rules that is not mentioned in the project nor defined in its .info file.

I am sure that if you wrap the function with a |if (module_exists('rules'))| function https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21module.inc/function/module_exists/7.x, then that specific error will go away ...but then the module will most likely stop working too.

Luckily for you, the Rules module is already ported in Backdrop https://backdropcms.org/project/rules, so you can try and see if things work after installing it. Do let us know if it does 😉

ok, that worked, thanks. Installed/activated Rules, and error is gone, so vChess module works with BD with all those extra, manual steps. At the very least there is a documentation job to do, which can be done before trying to find a maintainer, I guess. I will try to find out how to update documentation bits (not familiar with github at all).

Is there a page/place where newbie developers (potential maintainers) can go and browse through a list of "modules-seeking-maintainer(s)"?

If not, wouldn't that be practical?

Regards, @LeeteqXV