Mysterious Pilot

The default skin (crystal) only has a content area that covers the whole width. I would like to use a skin that has a side column on the left and probably also one with side columns on the left and right in addition to the main content area. I have seen them in some of the other VAs, looked all over the SKINS forum but apparently all the skins are either outdated (don't work well with .944) or just dead links to sites that no longer exist. Anybody has one such current skins?

And the template is no longer available, another VA goes down the tube.

And the site is gone...

Yes time zones and sim times complicate things for any user and virtual airlines. However, there is a simple solution to that problem (the beauty of the simplest solution) and that is, the schedule has a departure and arrival times (sure, with time zone). But also has a time duration. The system can compare the departure timestamp with the arrival timestamp and compare the given time duration (in the schedule) with the actual flight duration (take-off to landing) and compute the on-time index. And by the way, if you decide to do it you have to check the Flight Simulator time and not the System Time. People work and have lives so they cannot fly at the time when the actual flight takes place. That is why there is Flight Simulator time, you set it to the time you want and that is it.

Thanks Keith, I somehow missed it.

One can define an award but it only covers specifying the URL of the image, the name and description. There are no trigger specifications such as "grant on rank promotion" or "grant on X successful flights" or "grant manually". In my case I created just one award that would be granted when completing 20 landings on a special subset of airports (challenging approaches). My main question however is, once awards are defined I don't see a way to either grant them automatically (see above) or manually. For example, I miss some "Grant Award" on the Pilot menu. Am I missing something?

Did export the whole database and the config file. However, there are other things that must be moved to (export) such as Downloadable files, Rank images, Award images, etc. Anyway, got myself setup on another host already. Now I have to create the pages.

I had it on a paid hosting and nothing was working, on the free hosting it worked like a charm (in fact even faster than my paid hosting). The only drawback was that SMTP was not supported so mails could not be sent out. Luckily things got sorted out on my paid hosting account (they moved me to another server with FastCGI) only it is relatively slow compared to the free host (go figure!). In my paid hosting account sending mails works without configuring SMTP as you mentioned. What doesn't quite work is that when the mail doesn't get sent one still gets a "Completed!" message without indication that it actually failed.

Well the general format for a well formed flight plan is: WAYPOINT airway WAYPOINT airway WAYPOINT If there is an intended change of altitude, it is given at the WAYPOINT entry (no spaces): WAYPOINT airway WAYPOINT/ALTITUDE airway WAYPOINT And ALTITUDE may be an Altitude (Axxx) or a Flight Level (Fxxx). However you can ignore the /ALTITUDE part because it really doesn't matter in phpVMS. The only meaningul stuff are the waypoints because those you would look them up in the DB to fetch the LAT/LON. Sometimes instead of an actual airway you find DCT (Direct). WAYPOINT can be any VOR/NDB/FIX/InTersection, etc. Of course, an uninitiated virtual pilot would just file a file plan without airway.

There is no folder defined for it, in fact you can have the award image anywhere on the internet because on the award definition page you specify the URL. However, for the sake of having everything together I opted for hosting the image within phpVMS. There is no award images folder so I created the 'awards' folder under /lib/images, that is /lib/images/awards/ put the images there. When you define an award in the URL text field simply put something like /lib/images/awards/MYAWARD.jpg just replace "MYAWARD.jpg" with the actual name of your award image. Keep them all of the same size. Also remember that if you are hosting phpVMS on Linux/Unix then the file name is case sensitive, on Windows hosts it is not.

Hum that works fine in UNIX environments but in Windows hosting you cannot create a file called .htaccess.

As it turns out the free webhosting account does not support SMTP :-( so yet another reason to figure out a way to export everything to import on my paid hosting account. This however brings a bug about... no application should tell the user the operation has been successful when in fact it hasn't :-) I think it probably has a catch error and ignore. In this case it should tell te user something like "Unable to send the email. Has it been configured?" Likewise, the checkinstall.php may use an extra check to verify that it can send an email (no matter about receiving it).

I am trying to test the system and tried the Mail All Pilots with a sample message. It said the mail was sent successfully. However, I have (the only pilot and admin) not received any mail in my inbox or junk mail folder. In the local.config.php I found a setting for email name & address and something else like "Use SMTP". That leaves me a bit confused because how can it pretend to send mail without SMTP? It has been 30 minutes and the email doesn't arrive to either Inbox or Junk. I was able to send an email from my Hotmail (receiving acct) to the email account created on the server.

Something odd has happened. I went to the schedules export to see what it would do but i decided not to export, none of the dialogs allow the user to cancel an operation (change his mind), something that definitely needs some attention in design. Anyway, the problem is, now that I go to the Airports and Schedules pages, they both show no airports and no schedules, EMPTY! This is just horrible, a disaster, well so I thought because it took me hours. I logged out and in again but the problem persists, the grid simply doesn't display any airports or schedules but shows the awards, pilots, fleet, rank etc. The pilot shows a list of two hubs so I though, either there is no referential integrity or this application copies everything to the foreign table. Out of curiousity (and not wanting to reenter all this stuff again) I dived straight into the database. I see that ALL the records of AIRPORTS and SCHEDULES are still there. So how comes both the Airports list and Schedules list show as if there were none? I clicked on the REFRESH icon several times but nothing comes up. This is a show stopper, any help on this?

I have configured my VA in another site while the other hosting platform's problem were solved. Having that done I want to move all my VA configuration to the other platform. Is there a way to do a full export? I only see Import/Export schedules but don't see that for airlines, airports, pilots, awards, etc. For example what if I export the schedules and in there I add a new schedule that was not present before. Will it add it or fail? if any of the imported schedules has a new airport I suppose that would fail because of the referential integrity, right?

Thanks, I was obviously posting them in the wrong place. I also discovered the JIRA bug tracker.

That I know, but the problem there is that in the visual you tell the user to enter time as HH:MM which is more user friendly but the software interprets this wrongly and therefore computes the wrong flight duration value.

This error that appeared in both installs in two separate hosting platforms is due to the fact that when I go and view the only airport (KJFK) and pop up the edit window it does NOT have the HUB checkmark checked. The code that renders the registration page should check whether there are any hubs defined and do something about it rather than letting the form "crash". Better yet, since hubs are needed the checkdb.php script (or checkinstall.php) should check that there is at least one hub defined. If by default it is actually marked as hub then that would indicate that there is a bug somewhere else.

I created a new folder called awards in the images folder next to rank. I put the award images there and reference that on the award creation page.

Well, I hope you don't mind the bug reports as well as the general feedback regarding nice to have things in case you ever go that way. I must say that two or three years ago I started my virtual airline (a jet airline) using a PHP virtual airline system called VAdmin. It seemed great and looked great indeed. The VAdmin PHP software was the 2nd round of development from the developer (free), but unfortunately he never managed to finish it and it was very (very) buggy. I had to spend an inordinate amount of time browsing through his code to fix the errors and in the process also make certain modifications to add other features or missing items. In the end, I had to drop the whole project because I was spending too much time fixing his problems and little time to actually have a stable VA software. And then a few days ago by mere curiosity I looked and came across PHP VMS. I know it is not perfect and some of us may want other features but all in all I must say I am very satisfied with the quality of the package and by looking at your code I can say you are the kind of programmer I would have on a team (I work as IT architect, design and others program). So I must say this year I have come across two great pieces of good workmanship: Plan G (freeware flight planner) and PHP VMS, my congratulations man. Anyway, given that PHP is open and that you are only one guy doing all the work (???) perhaps you could consider putting the project in SourceForge and have other programmers (choose them well, you don't want them to make a mess of your stuff) join your team. I think everybody would benefit by having a team of people implementing new features.

I have created my sample VA which I hope to bring online. Each of the schedules I have created have a real life flight plan in the right form, i.e. DAV b502 POXON/A050 r773 COT In other words between each waypoint the corresponding airway name and some waypoints I have also given the target altitude. Well, that is what I learned in a nice virtual airline:). So, I decided to experiment with the View Route link that is shown in the list of schedules. As expected it displays a map with the (optional) route. The map only shows a line between departure and arrival and not the line through the waypoints (if given). Also, the shown map is missing the [X] Close button that one has come up to expect with this type of image overlay.

I have the latest (stable) version running and found another problem with the Add/Edit Schedule. In the form it asks the user to enter the flight time in HH:MM format. I entered a schedule that departs at 09:15 and arrives at 10:05, that leaves a flight time of 00:50 (50 minutes). However, when I go to edit the same schedule I see that my 00:50 (which I entered in the format indicated in the form) always gets transformed to 0.5 and that is just 30 minutes (half an hour) rather than the 50 minutes I indicated.

I installed it on a free webhost and there seems to work fine (except for a message with registration form). I am configuring that one and then will export to the other site. My webhost provider (the paid one) has moved my PHP application to some other configuration and now it appears to work. There is however a problem with the registration form (script error) that says: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in \\myhost\home\users\web\b2326\whl.meofcourse\core\templates\registration_mainform.tpl on line 45 I see the same error appearing on the alternate install (free host).

Nabeel, while some of the items are actually issues (things that don't work quite right) many of them are just suggestions. It is up to you to decide whether to do the improvement or not. I was an open source developer for maaaaaany years so I know the feeling. Now I must ask myself, are you really interested in my feedback regarding those suggestions or should I just keep them to myself? It also saves me some time.

I guess the application is US-centric but as it so happens it can be used all over the world. I managed to enter my airports of both standard scenery (ICAO code available) as well add-ons (no icao code or with ICAO but not in FS). So I proceeded to make the schedules based on the real life airline and found these issues: a) The flight duration (there is a text field for that) can be calculated from the departure/arrival times The Departure/Arrival times assume a HH:MM TZ format but many countries not far from the US don't even have time zones. Perhaps it should also allow Z (Zulu) and in the Airport details it should let the user enter the UTC offset. c) The Price should show the (default) currency in the form. This is another oversight though, PHPVMS allows one to create multiple airlines so it is quite possible that not all the airlines use the same currency. Therefore the default currency should be per airline rather than application wide. d) The application should make more effective use of the administrator's time :-) for example: d.1) Allow the possibility to create a new schedule based on an existing one. For example when the airline flies the same route several times in a day. d.2) Allow to create the return trip based on an existing schedule. Same as D.1 except that the dep/dest are reversed. In some cases the route may change. Wow! How did I became a tester after being an architect?