Fantasy Grounds in Joomla

[danielfruth]

I have a Joomla website and I have thought, at times, wouldn't it be fantastic if I could display my campaign's character sheets on the website. Preferably in a format that looks like the original character sheet (5e in my case). I looked into it a little bit and noted that the character sheets are in an XML format. This is pretty much just a list of stat names and stat values. So you might be able to make a PHP file to view it... but it wouldn't look at all like the character sheets. The part in FG that formats all that data and displays it in a nice looking tabbed sheet seems to be pretty deep in the FG guts.

Does anyone with a deeper knowledge of Joomla and FG than me know if it would be possible to make an extension for a module that would display the sheets as more than just a list of items? It's likely just a dream but it would be cool.

Going a little deeper into the why: One of the things I dislike is the fact that FG is only available when the GM's game server is up and active. Now I can see how having all this information available wouldn't be good from a copyright point of view, however, even if it was a static/read-only view of the characters, stats and their weapons and spells it would help tremendously to make plans in between games so you wouldn't have to waste time to think how to level your character when you really want to play the game. I don't think I'll have much luck getting the programmer to redesign FG but even just looking at your characters in between sessions would be valuable.

Now I know FG, even in free mode, can view the exported character sheets, so why bother? Well first of all my friends aren't all the most techy. A good half of them wouldn't know what to do with the exported character sheet. Second of all, my web page has a nice little blog section that chronicles the weekly adventures, character history, house rules, maps and the gods that in use by the characters. Adding the character sheets display would be a nice addition to the character histories and be infinitely easier to use than taking screenshots of the characters. Easier to update too. Just thinking of updating screenshots for eight players... every week, makes me cringe.

[damned]

In FGC just have the players load FG and click on Manage Characters.
They can choose the campaign and see their character.

[LordEntrails]

Their is a thread titled something like 'Campaign Printer', you can use that as a basis for converting FG xml to other formats. xml and html are just structured text. You just need to format the FG xml to something you can use.

That said, don't ask me how, I haven't figure it out myself.

[danielfruth]

In FGC just have the players load FG and click on Manage Characters.
They can choose the campaign and see their character.

I can't believe that I didn't know about this! To be honest even after you told me this it took a bit to get this working. After I selected the ruleset I didn't realize I had to choose the campaign. Partly because I didn't recognize the name of the campaign. It's not one of the things obvious to a player. Or at least I am not aware how its identified to the player inside FG.

Anyway, this is exactly what I wanted. When I try to create a new character here I get an error for the roll and assign method but I can manually make one. Probably an extension conflict. Now I can try to get the other players to export their characters and send me them for inclusion on my website. That part might be tricky since half (maybe more) of them seem to be either technophobes or simply hate my web site and refuse to visit it;)




Their is a thread titled something like 'Campaign Printer', you can use that as a basis for converting FG xml to other formats. xml and html are just structured text. You just need to format the FG xml to something you can use.

That said, don't ask me how, I haven't figure it out myself.


I tried the Campaign Printer. Really I tried. However, the XSL character sheets for 5e have the fonts distorted and only show two pages of mostly empty information. I saw the link to "https://www.alonlinetools.net/" in this forum discussion and tried that. It is a little buggy, so every time I had to submit the sheet twice but it worked and exported a pdf version of the character sheet. The downside of this is the length. My character sheet was 28 pages and included way more data than I would like to have. I mean all I wanted was a brief spell list, with maybe damage, range etc. I definitely get more than I need. If printed it out I would likely kill a tree. Still, as a link to a character sheet on my web page it's okay. It needs an option for a briefer summary though.