Hi MD friends! It's been a few months so here's an update on what we've been working on.
While writing this update, community leader, amazing developer, and great person asivery released his latest version of Web MiniDisc Pro [*]. WMDpro is the most advanced MiniDisc software in the world and the flagship project of the MD development community. Please refer to asivery's Reddit post [*] and GitHub [*] for the most detailed update information. A corresponding version of ElectronWMD will be published soon.
This version doesn't bring that many new features, but instead polishes the existing ones, updates all dependencies and resolves many small bugs - both UI and NetMD related.
The Wiki hosts the official Web MiniDisc Pro application as well as its user guide. Asivery and SpecialK are working to update the guide to reflect changes made in the new version.
The MiniDisc Wiki and Web MiniDisc Pro work together closely, and we encourage everyone who enjoys the app to support asivery directly via Ko-Fi. We are honored to host the application, documentation, and development resources but asivery is the lead developer so please support him before the wiki as a thanks for his work. [*]
After a month of soliciting input (thank you for those who helped!) we've launched the new, sectioned Getting Started guide. It's a lot less overwhelming to people new to the format, and answers nearly every question we've seen new entrants ask.
Opinions, additions and edits are always welcomed.
We tracked down information on nearly every single device that can play MDs - wouldn't every single disc be nice too? We've collected data on discs for some time, but the landing page is now much nicer and resembles the one in the equipment section.
Please do your part to contribute - there's even a handy form to create a new entry.
Remotes are some of the most popular accessories for MD, so we need to document and organize them as we have equipment and discs. There's now an automated listing of every remote we have a page for, and the database includes links to bundled equipment (and vice versa) - just like we did with battery pages several months ago.
This section needs a lot more additions, but we're working on it and need your help!
Remotes aren't the only accessories, so we're making space to effectively organize those too. Community members have agreed that MD-adjacent hardware that cannot read MD itself should be moved over to the accessories section, and that will be complete soon.
Not much has happened here, however the equipment infoboxes on each page now once again show the number of internal batteries alongside the link to the battery page. New contributor Mgfesiooh has suggested following a similar pattern for sidecar battery holders, so we've created a wiki namespace (section) which we will be able to link to on device pages. This will show cross-compatibility for different sidecars and portable models, which there's a lot of demand for. Watch this space for updates in the coming weeks and months!
Although we've had database fields for mechanisms and ICs for a while, new contributor Voxxi (d86592) has stepped up and added a bunch of pages with details and datasheets. Just like batteries, equipment pages can include a link to the IC page which lists other equipment using that IC. This data isn't shown in our infoboxes (yet) but can be easily added to a page. Once we have data entered for a majority of devices we'll revisit whether to include that data on every page's infobox.
At the bottom of our equipment start page, there is now a “random page” button that will show you a random device in our database. If you're overwhelmed by 2000+ devices, want to see something you otherwise wouldn't have, or even want to add some extra data to a page, this is a cool way to start.
Many thanks to asivery for updating the Dokuwiki plugin to support regex and for helping so quickly.
We never stand still! In the coming weeks and months you'll see us update the Web MiniDisc Pro user guide, work on the new pages mentioned above, test major changes to the site's theming using a secondary server, and general cleanup of pages. It's exciting stuff, so check back often to see what we've been hard at work doing.