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The showpiece.php script is not the old way. It is newer than even shortcodes. Both are described on this page in a details section that you have to click on to open. Unlike this script, which draws a piece on a colored space surrounded by a colored border, showpiece.php will draw nothing but the piece, and it will be against a transparent background. While displaying individual pieces with showpiece.php is preferable to using drawdiagram.php, it is mainly intended for use with Game Courier or Interactive Diagrams, and shortcodes remain the best thing to use for illustrating member-submitted rules pages.
Here's a post with a bit of history. In case there was doubt, it wasn't my imagination that I/other(s) had been allowed since long ago to use drawdiagram.php to display individual pieces in submissions:
Fergus wrote (on 11 Mar 2016):
"Since some contributors have been using drawdiagram.php to display individual pieces, I have made a couple changes.
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When drawdiagram.php is used to display a single piece image, it will not display coordinate labels.
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The Diagram Designer now includes code you can cut and paste for displaying the piece images used in your diagram. This code places piece images within FIGURE.piece tags with a caption, and I have added CSS to the global css files for formatting the piece class for FIGURE..."
[edit: Where did I more recently get the idea I was no longer allowed to display individual pieces my old way?:
Fergus wrote on Tue, Jan 16 04:28 PM EST (in a Comment to my Waffle Chess rules page): "I used shortcodes to display the Waffle piece image, as drawdiagram.php is meant for diagrams, not for displaying individual pieces..."]
edit2: to be fair, displaying an individual piece with shortcodes these days (don't think it was always an available option) is fairly easy (once I saw Fergus' example on my rules page), I hadn't noticed that method. Displaying individual pieces with the showpiece.php script (or whatever Fergus' old way was, if different), on the other hand, is a process I never understood, and it seemed lengthy however it is done.
I have fixed this so that setting the group changes the available sets like it does in Game Courier, using JavaScript without any need to reload the page.
I've reorganized this page to be less cluttered and more mobile-friendly, and I've updated the details on how to display individual pieces. I'll continue work on it tomorrow.
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Last night I did open links on the details section on Diagram Designer Page, but I still could not quite get my head around what the showpiece.php script was all about. It looked like something a Diagram Designer really ought to be able to generate by putting a piece into the diagram somehow, but I was afraid it's something you have to type in character by character somewhere, and then cut and paste somewhere. Maybe there was technical stuff a user should know about (e.g. HTML knowledge assumed).
Whatever the old way of generating an individual piece was, I could not get my head around that either, and technical stuff is not always easy to explain to someone unfamiliar with modern computers/software, unless a ready example or two is available. I was quite happy when I realized I could put an individual piece on a 1x1 'board' (i.e. single square) using the drawdiagram.php. The method is quick and easy, if not 'brilliant', though it produces an image of the sort you seem to no longer be quite satisfied with, after second thoughts (maybe years later[?]). Too bad drawdiagram.php does not work if a 0x0 board were specified, to leave out the image of a single 'square'.