Analog Advent Calendar

This repository holds the implementation of the anabrid advent calendar website 2024. Relevant ideas and concepts are collected at https://outline.anabrid.com/doc/analog-advent-calendar-0i37810U6T and subpages. The website was launched on the anabrid tinydichter VPS, deployed using Caddy & PHP-FPM, manually synced to git remotes and public available at https://analog.wtf.

Furthermore, at Dec 01 a stripped down fork/copy of the repo was released at https://github.com/anabrid/analog-advent containing only the data up to current day in December.

Code and Development

This website is kind of traditional PHP, everything is running from website/index.php. This page can be launched for testing by calling:

cd website && php -S localhost:8080

on a developer system that has PHP-CLI installed.

Important: The directory user_data must be writable by PHP.

Design choices and improvements neccessary

• This is a flat file design so it can sync nicely with git. The flat files are an ugly mix of CSV and JSON(-Lines), basically mimics a file based document database. The current design is not easily extendable, for instance we don't track any dates when user changes happen. It would be nice to improve that.
• System has an unconventional user handling with "tokens" and a homebrewn chaotic cookie managament. Obviously there is an urgent need to improve that. Edit: The secret to avoid free user names was accidentally put online with the inital github commit, so this needs a rework anyway.
• Current traditional PHP provides near-to-no protection against HTML injection or CORS. This is not really a problem since users get displayed their own code only and never see data from other users. Furthermore, the current deployment seperates the website clearly from anything important.
• Many problems could be solved when using a proper framework such as Symfony or Django. The reason we did not choose a framework was primarily the flexibility of having generic kind of quizzes (not limited to something which has to map on a database) and the ad-hoc approach of the general project without a clear perspective in mind.