Welcome to the development pages for vim online.

vim online is a portal for vim users that provides a central place for script uploads and tip additions among other things. The production version of vim online is served at vim.sf.net. vim online has it's own sourceforge project distinct from vim for code, bugs, enhancements specific to the site.

If you have feedback on vim online feel free to contact vimonline-support at lists.sourceforge.net or directly at scrott at users.sourceforge.net (Scott Johnston) and jmorace at users.sourceforge.net (Jonathan Morace). I try to keep all feature requests and bugs in the sourceforge trackers. The site is hooked up to the sourceforge stats engine so you can always check out our usage statistics.

So How Does It all Work?

vim online is written in dynamic php pages with a mysql database backend. All dynamic entities (tips, news items, users, etc.) are stored in the mysql database. Php dynamically generates the site pages on the fly based on the database data. The site is hosted by sourceforge which is kind enough to offer amazing hosting services for free to open source projects. The code is structured as closely to a 3 tier application as php will allow. In doing this we have made some attempt to separate the code from the html presentation layer. The line between the top two layers ends up a bit fuzzy but that's life. Information about php can be found at http://www.php.net. Details on mysql can be found at http://www.mysql.com. Apache can be found at your friendly http://www.apache.org. The dynamic nature of the site is what makes it hard to mirror. The complexity of mirroring database applications (at least read/write database apps) is often done at the price of stability and simplicity.

How Does Development Work?

Obviously we can't work on the production system right? Nobody would be happy about that. To develop vim online we install a mysql database, an apache server and php on our own machines. All development occurs in these dev environments and then changes are checked into CVS. When features have been fully tested they get deployed to the production system. I try to focus on two major things when developing the site: stability and interface design.