Order of Precedence software

The history of the OP software in Ansteorra is a little unobvious to basically everybody, as it has never really been directly related to an office at all, other than being work done for whoever was Zodiacus at the time, and that work has been done by very few people. Of course, for many years all of the OP records were done on paper, until Master Rumil Fletcher (RIP), I believe, put it all into a Foxpro database, which he then handed to me when I became Zodiacus after him, and then I handed it off to my successor, Mistress Serena Lascelles. Somehow she made an arrangement with Master Francois la Flamme for him to create a web tool and database so that one didn't have to install Foxpro (already an antiquated piece of software) on a computer to do the OP work. Francois knew little about PHP (a programming language for web server stuff, basically; AMP is also in PHP, for example) at the time but it was enough to get by for around ten years, I think.

I eventually became concerned that newer PHP software versions were going to make the OP site stop working and had a look around (I held the office currently called Obelisk back when it was called Estencele and later Sigillarius, so had some opportunity to poke around) and started working through my next tenure as Zodiacus (during which I had no time to actually do much coding, but anyway) and then finished a new working site during Magistra Estrill Swet's first tenure and with her as the "customer" refining what needed to be in it. This turned out to be timely as -- as I had feared -- Francois' code stopped working and we had to go live abruptly.

Anyway, since then I have worked with Zodiacus (of which there have been all of two during that time, I think -- Estrill and Master William Palfrey) to maintain the OP site and, in the past several months, written an entirely new version of the site (looks much the same, but under the hood it's a complete rewrite) as I discovered that once again changes in PHP are going to break the current site in the near future. Fortunately the new site is about ready to go live as soon as Magistra Estrill and I both agree that it is at the same time. :-) It's this version that I'll look into adding Master Alden's suggestion to in some form. (The new site went live since I wrote this.)

Yours, Reis ap Tuder