Post
by Bon Echo » Fri Jul 19, 2019 9:53 pm
You are going to notice that the new OCNA is a lot more euro-styled than it was before. that's no accident. The new site is basically a copy of the existing code used in most of the other Opencaching nodes - Poland, Netherlands, Romania, UK. The founder of opencaching.us (circa 2010) took a copy of the .pl code and modified it to make it work for the USA. Problem was that the code was not really updated and, well, by 2017 it had major problems. This new code is not a copy - OCNA is now integrated into the ".pl" code so that any important updates made to the .pl code also get pushed to all the nodes - including OCNA. There are small variations that are made on a "per-node" basis but the main site code must now work across the different nodes, all but one being in Europe. This will also show up in the way some things get translated, since there is a single English translation file for all the nodes. It may sound comical, but we actually had discussions about whether the attribute "bring a flashlight" should be translated as "Flashlight" or "Torch"
I have no doubt that changes to the code could be made so that the user could select, for example, if they want metric or imperial units. But with only a small number of skilled code writers maintaining all the sites, things like that will be a pretty small priority.
Hope that makes sense, Harrie please add to this if you wish
(BTW I should introduce harrieklomp - he is the webmaster for opencaching.nl serving Netherlands, Belarus and Luxembourg. He has put in many hours helping to make the new OCNA site a reality. Thanks Harrie for the hard work.)
This is also the reason why some cache types are not yet working correctly on the new OCNA - BIT cache, Guestbook, etc. Because those are unique to OCNA they did not exist in the oc.pl code. They are being added but there's still a few kinks to be worked out before those cache types will be fully functional.