Not much been going on in my blogosphere for the last few days. I’ve added a new section entitled ‘gaming’ which is a list of RPG/boardgames we play as a family at home and I’ve added a few to start off with. I plan on adding some photos at somepoint along with more info about the games as I get round to it. Most of the games we play are dice rolling board hoppers but I’ve been trying to gently guide us away from that into the land of more interesting games. I grew up on warhammer, 40k, blood bowl etc… and i play RPGs on the consoles so I’m trying to pretend I know what I’m doing and so far we have dabbled in some old RPGs, some tabletop battles and some tile games. So how have we done? Bearing in mind that our group consists of an eight year old and a thirty*numberdeletedonpainofdeath* year old who has never played these kind of games before, I think they have both taken to it quite well.

The writeups have also been a test of a plugin I stumbled across the other week called ‘Inventory manager’ and can be downloaded from alphachannelgroup.com

While trying to come up with the pages I was looking for something to help list items without having to:
a) use a shoping cart plugin
b) write loads of html to sort them into neat tables/rows/columns/items/etc….

What Inventory manager does is allow you to create a database list of items and fill in the details via a simple, yet very customisable, form. There are a few little bits to tweak in the controls such as names of categories, display options, labels and the css which help to give a huge degree of control over the look of the items. As I was listing Items which I am not selling I was able to disable the ‘reserve’ feature after I had spent some tinkering to change the default from $ into £. I thought of originally listing prices that I paid for the games but realised that some of the items had been bought over 20 years ago so price was a bit pointless.

My initial installation of the plugin met with a little bit of frustration as I was unable to add new items and eventually contacted the plugin writer via the site. Cale (the creator) was fab in helping sort the issue and and even pointed out a few things I hadn’t thought of when I was playing with the plugin. All in all, this is a nice plugin for an ecommerce site with or without the commerce. I can really see a good use for this on sites with a big list of products but only one or two of each item such as bespoke crafted items, antiques or secondhand dealers.