[pmwiki-users] Defining and displaying chess diagrams in WikiPages

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 10:53:00PM +0100, Christian Bartolomaeus wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I wonder whether someone else will be interested in defining and
> displaying chess diagrams in WikiPages.
> 
> I use PmWiki for the website of a chess club [1]. Some months ago I
> began to think about the possibility to display chess diagrams in
> WikiPages easily. My idea was, that it should be possible for an
> author to define a certain position using an easy syntax and that
> PmWiki displays the according diagram. This way, it would be easy to
> beautify a report about a chess match, let's say. One could even try
> to make some analyses of a certain chess position.

This is cool.

Even *cooler* would be to have PmWiki calculate the board position
from a set of moves given standard algebraic format and display
that.  Thus an author could write:

     1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. e4 

     (:chessboard:)

     4. ... d6 5. Nf3 O-O 6. Bd3 Bg4 7. h3 

     (:chessboard:)

and the (:chessboard:) directives would display the board as it exists
as of the current set of moves.  Of course, moves would be allowed
to appear on separate lines and with other text commentary mixed in
between them.  And the code wouldn't need to check the validity of
the moves -- it could assume that they're valid -- it just needs to 
place pieces where indicated by the moves.

What a neat idea!  :-)

Pm