Initial Build, Light Mode and Pasted-Table Formatting

Date: 2026-05-26 Project: ScratchingPost Status: resolved Tags: aspnet-core, mvc, sqlite, tinymce, iis, signage, ui

Context

Scratching Post is a self-hosted digital signage / notice board for a school, deployed to IIS, and part of a broader "Sunbeam" framework. The first sessions (2026-05-20 to 2026-05-26) built the app to v1.0 and then fixed display issues — primarily that tables pasted from Google Sheets rendered badly and the default dark slide background made content hard to read on real screens.

Key Decisions

ASP.NET Core 8 MVC + SQLite with EnsureCreated() — no formal EF migrations; simplest deploy for a single-server IIS app. Trade-off: schema changes need manual handling (see Aug session).
Cat-themed terminology — slides = Meows, device playlists = PURRs, display nodes = Kittens. An early rename to "Posts" was reverted to Kittens; always read live code for names rather than relying on memory.
TinyMCE self-hosted (from a local folder, light oxide theme) rather than a CDN — works offline on the school network, no API key.
Light mode default, white slide background, black text — the dark default looked poor on display screens and clashed with pasted content.
Normalise pasted tables — strip colgroup and width attributes, auto-width columns, uniform 1px solid black borders with border-collapse: collapse. Keeps Sheets pastes readable without manual cleanup.
Whitelist all inline styles and text-align in the sanitiser so formatting from the editor survives to the display.
Cookie auth for the admin panel, credentials in appsettings.json — single-admin tool; a user DB was not warranted.

Technical Details

Slide types: Content/WYSIWYG, Embed/iframe, ICS Calendar.
Per-device playlists with drag-and-drop ordering (SortableJS).
Per-device resolution config with CSS transform aspect-ratio scaling.
URL-based device routing, e.g. /frontofhouse, /staffroom.
Light/dark admin toggle persisted in localStorage.
IIS deploy: ASP.NET Core Hosting Bundle required; IIS_IUSRS needs Modify on the publish directory.
Admin credentials in appsettings.json — value <redacted>.

Code Changes

Initial app: Controllers/, Models/, Data/, Views/, Routing/, wwwroot/, Program.cs, NoticeBoard.csproj, web.config.
Edit view, preview and display — white default background, black text, dark table borders, paste formatting preservation.
TinyMCE paste handling — colgroup/width stripping, auto-width columns, 1px borders.

Open Questions / Next Steps

Planned ASK feature: priority slides that interrupt a playlist.

Artifacts

feat: Light mode default, auth, Posts rename, display scaling, TinyMCE improvements (2026-05-21)
fix: Pasted tables — auto-width columns, 1px solid black borders, remove colgroups (2026-05-26)
Repo: https://gitea.hideawaygaming.com.au/jessikitty/ScratchingPost

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