Feel free to pick my brain as well. I can help with the formatting issues of the submitted tabs, and particularly the bios and timeline, plus the song list if it is still incomplete.

Yeah, I'm sure Pete and I could team up and knock some of those things out.

Murder McMurderson wrote:
I think a Tab section is a good idea. I want to add more sections to the Information menu like Tabs, Biographies, and Timeline. But they're going to take a lot of work, especially tbs, because I have a bad comprehension of how they work and how they should look. Someone else would have to be in charge of it.

i would love to help out with the tab section. or is it only for moderators? i play tabs frequently. the only thing is you might have some copyright issues.....

Can anyone show me what a good tab site should look like?

As far as Pumpkins related tab sites, 0bscured has done pretty well. And I also use SPFC's tab section quite frequently.

http://www.0bscured.com/flash.html

http://www.spfc.org/music/gtab.html
Also

http://www.blamo.org/sp/tabs/

http://www.netphoria.org/rottenapples/sp.htm

Another idea would be to put a tab in with the song list information. Like they do on Landslide
http://landslide.2007.org/omnipedia/1979.htm

So are plain text files preferred? They all look somewhat sloppy. Although 0bscured's look very organized. Is there a reason why they don't use formatted text?

That's pretty much the standard. Tabs are intended to be very basic and reader friendly. There is software that will write tabs, but for internet purposes a txt file is the way to go. I've tried to format them differently, but it's very time consuming and frustrating.

In order for a tab to be readable it must be in a font whose characters are equaly wide, so no character takes more space than the previous one, this is called a monospace font so the standard font to use might be "Courier" or "Courier New", if you want to use something different than plain text, you may want to consider this

Ah, that makes sense.

Lucidia Console, size 10- obscured uses it, i use it on what i wright (only hav elke 2 tabs though).

Here's a basic test page. http://www.thepumpkins.net/content/view/711/163/

How does it look?

looks good to me

I agree... but watch the width. Some tab sections can be wide depending on the song, so it might be rough having to scroll over all the time. Not sure if you can change this in anyway though.. so looks good to me.

Good advice. I can use the wider template like the one we use for the Forum.

looks good,

Okay, PistolePete, Rivers and Teej have been given Publisher abilities and the ability to upload tabs.

To upload your tabs txt files go here:

http://www.thepumpkins.net/component/option,com_joomla_flash_uploader/Itemid,164/

You may want to bookmark that.

Please name your text files with the name of the song. I don't know if you guys will be writing your own tabs or finding them, or a combination of both. It's up to you. Please make sure they're neat and not very cluttered.

Once you upload your txt file with the uploader they will be located at:

http://www.thepumpkins.net/tab/ (can't visit directly)

For example, the test tab file is located at:

http://www.thepumpkins.net/tab/test.txt

The uploader will show you what files are in the folder. If you need to make a change to a file, you can download it and then reupload it and it will be replaced.

Now you need to make a page to display your tab. Go to the Tab section and click on the "New" button:



Or if you need to edit a page, click on the edit icon:



Please only do this in the Tabs section.

Then you will see this:



Here's what you do here:

In Title put: Tab - Song Name (capitalize the first letter of each word)

In Category select Tabs obviously.

Ignore Intro Text

In Main Text copy and paste this basic HTML:

<center>
<iframe src ="/tab/test.txt"
height="600px" width="720px" frameborder="1" >
</iframe>
</center>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thepumpkins.net/tab/test.txt" target="_blank">Download Link</a>

Here's what you need to replace in this code:

In the two places where it says test.txt replace "test" with whatever the name of you file is.

Where it says Download Link you can replace it with the name of the song.

Where it says 600 is the height of the tab area. I'll let you decide what the number should be.

Now the work is done.



On the Publishing tab, select Published to automatically make the page public or Unpublished if it's not ready.



Click the blue button to save and apply or the red x to cancel.

That's it. I know it look like a lot, but it's really not at all. If you need any help, just ask me. Thanks for the help.