I'm just throwing this out there as I'm plodding my way through creating a Member Photo album on a site i'm working on, where they can login and upload their photos to a personal gallery. I want this to be nice and lightweight, but still slick and "modern" with a modal based interface for the user. I'm surprised though that there is seemingly nothing open source out there which fits the bill - I've done a few searches on Google to no avail and can't seem to find anything. Lots of bloated photo galleries out there but nothing looks like it has been developed using more recent technologies.
Is anyone aware of anything which might suit what I'm looking for? I'm fully prepared to try and code it myself but I'd be delighted if I didn't have to! Pure laziness you might say, but there's no point reinventing the wheel.
Take a look at Gallery
Related
This is my first entry into backend development, taking mostly a design role in past projects. Im working on a personal project and have fleshed out what I feel is a logic of sorts. Just a few very basic user tasks broken down.
Core User Actions:
A user can create a new posting
A user can find posts from other users by tag, date created, and
other content. This is done in kinda a central search area. (Search
string: "Dog Saddle", retrieves posts with mentions of dog saddels,
dogs, and saddels)
A post's creator can be contacted from the post.
A user can delete their created posts.
I need guidance/suggestions with the following:
What data should I capture for users?
What framework is best for the application dynamics I've described? (ROR, Python, PHP ect. I'm a one man team currently)
Are there open source projects I may gain reference from?
I'm very dedicated to learning on my own, and can make use of good advice!
Thanks,
Given the rather generic requirements you've outlined and that you are just entering into the development arena, you should try an established framework. That way you won't need to write everything from scratch. You'll still have plenty of control, but the benefits of many commonly used functions, classes etc that will speed up your development.
Give something like CodeIgniter for PHP a try. See http://codeigniter.com/. There are a lot of tutorials online to help you get started. For example, see http://net.tutsplus.com/sessions/codeigniter-from-scratch/.
What you've described doesn't suggest a particular language at all. ROR, Python, PHP--you could use any of those to create what you've described. PHP is considered by many to have a less steep learning curve than ROR and Python, which is why I recommended it. However, there are frameworks for these other languages as well that will give you the same benefits as code igniter.
In an effort to give a website im working on more functionality, im wanting the ability for readers to post comments/thoughts to the stories they read.
any ideas the best way to go about this?
ive tried Google but the minute i add the word "comments " + html or php etc (assuming i can do it in these languages) then google just gives me methods to commenting on code....
Any ideas, tips, tutorials etc ill gladly jump on.
Thanks in advance
-somdow
Well the most popular embeddable comment system is probably Disqus. Besides that you will have to look if there are plugins for your framework of choice - or just roll your own (a comment system is basically just like any other database backed PHP application - and there are many ways to implement these).
Why not just look at how popular content management systems have implemented comments? (For instance, take a look at how Drupal and Wordpress do it.) The manner in which you build a comment system will depend on your needs and the limitations imposed by the structure of the system you're trying to integrate it with.
You should work out your database schema first. I'm assuming you're writing all of this from from scratch. You haven't given a lot of details.
It will be easier if you put your comments in a separate table. Make sure you have some basic protections against bots(captcha, etc.)
Sort the results by the timestamp.
comments_table
Id
UserId
UserDisplayName
ArticleId
Comment
PostTime
Disqus is nice, I must say. If you want code that you want to copy/paste, Google Friend Connect is a different route you can take... Almost everyone has a google account and it only takes a few minutes to set up. They also have some sweet other widgets you might want to try out like rating, etc.
http://google.com/friendconnect
If you really want to customize it just how you want it, I would create your own commenting system with a MYSQL database to store all your data. You could even use some nice jQuery animations when they write / delete a comment. (I just did something simular to that and it's really nice).
Whatever works best for you -- roll with it!
Good luck,
Coulton
Hey, I'm trying to make a web app that allows users to write on a virtual drawing pad and record their drawings as the progress as a video. I know there's screen casting software out there, in fact, I have such software on my computer but I'm trying to create this ability online. Would anyone be able to suggest where I should start looking so that I could figure out how to do this?
I have pretty good programming skills with in flash and I'm good with php.
Thanks,
Mike
You might look into internet whiteboard software, like this one. A company called GroupBoard offers this as a service, including free offerings. Their stuff isn't great, but they're one of the only companies who offer it without requiring use of a browser plugin.
The link I provided contains tutorials for creating a whiteboard using AJAX alone.
You might want to try this product which allows you to record a collaborative whiteboard session, and optionally have it automatically uploaded to Vimeo. It can be embedded on your website.
I'm taking on a relatively small freelance project and my client would like to update several portions of their site; photo gallery, calendar list, about page, and some event links.
My gut tells me to use something like WordPress and use "Pages" for these sections, but I'm worried about my client maintaining the formatting. Especially something like calendar dates and links.
They won't be doing any blogging - this is just so they can update those sections when needed (obviously).
But then I thought, what if I just roll my own CRUD for these portions, but I'm not sure if that would be necessary for a project like this.
So what would people out there use in a situation like this? How much control does one have over the formatting of content in WordPress? I'd like not to have to teach my client on when to call certain CSS classes.
Any help is more than appreciated.
EDIT:
Any idea how the top carousel of BungoBox was made in WordPress? Or don't you think it's possible and that is done manually?
I would stick to wordpress or similar CMS system. It will be a pain-in-the-arse, to take care of formatting (WYSIWYG for client), take care of security, make the administation pages nice and functional, and so on.
You will find a LOT of information on wordpress as a cms on the web, for example see here
Have you considered any other cms system?
From the description this is a site that would consist of just a few pages that the client would want to update? if so, I'd stick with wordpress myself. There's a ton of pre-written modules and themes already out there, and there's no sense "re-inventing the wheel". Also I've found in my travels that Wordpress leads the pack in being able to manipulate content to your will of all the CMS's and the available WYSIWIG plugins they have. Remember, if they cant' get their document to look just right, guess whose getting the call, and who will be expected to fix it on your dime if you didn't specify that in your contract (you are offering maintenance as an additional feature right?)
Now if the client is looking for a more robust system, a larger site then I interpreted in your writeup, then I'd look into more of a CMS system such as Drupal or Joomla. Avoid the trap that seems to nail PHP coders that it'd be faster to do it yourself; it'd have to be a lot of custom functioanlity to start looking at building it yourself from the ground up (and even then, there's enough frameworks to help)
What about something like Drupal? Never used it personally, but I think it's built for this sort of thing, whereas WordPress is kind of tailored towards blogs.
Definatly go with wordpress, drupal is just too heavy for the job and will take you much longer to configure.
If you are worried about your client ruining design with a WYSIWYG editor, just don't give them access.. keep them on a need to know basis for their own good.
Working with wordpress will free you from maintaining security issues and many other unpredictable-at-this-point cases of reinventing the wheel.
I have a friend who is need of a web page. He does interior construction, and would like to have a gallery of his work. I'll probably go for a php host, and was thinking about the best way to implement the image gallery for him. I came up with:
Use flickr to host the images. They can be tagged, added to sets, and I can use both the tag and set information to display "categories" for the gallery, as well as browsing. Flickr also has multi-upload tools so that a 20 photo job won't be a PITA to upload.
How to best get at the api? Is there a good PHP library for flickr integration? Should I roll my own?
API key - is this considered a commercial project? The web page is for his business, and he will be paying me to create the site...
Is flickr the wrong tool for the job? It seems like a pretty good solution in my head, but is there something I'm missing? I haven't used their APIs at all.
Thanks for any input!
It sounds like a difficult way to do things - have you considered Gallery (No points on creativity for the name!).
Unless you're really wanting to save on bandwidth, I think you'd get much better results from installing some pre-built gallery.
The perfect solution for this kind of thing is Picasa (from Google ofcourse)
You get:
1gb of free storage space on a Google Picasaweb account that already has a web interface with embeddable slideshows and stuff
A compete image browse and upoad program for the client side (namely Picasa) that's directly connected to the web albums. It's so user friendly that even your grandma can put her pictures online with that.
RSS feeds and an API from google.
there's a custom light-weight PHP api available
Need anyting else?
Note from Chris to others that may be looking for an answer: The API can be found here.
I recently implemented a Flickr-based photo gallery for a client. Flickr was perfect for them for a lot of reasons. Gallery is an impressive open-source project, but its feature set (and complexity of administration) was overkill for what this client needed.
Check out the Flickr API, especially the section on building URLs, which will be necessary when building your web pages. Don't bother coding a PHP wrapper for the API's. phpFlickr has already done it, and it's a smart implementation.
Here's a helper function I wrote that made life a lot easier for the various pages that need to access Flicker:
function newFlickr()
{
static $flickr = NULL;
if($flickr != NULL)
{
return $flickr;
}
$flickr = new phpFlickr(api-key, secret);
$flickr->setToken(token);
$flickr->enableCache("db", "mysql://acct:pass#localhost/flickrcache");
return $flickr;
}
The trick here is that all the crud you need to enter is stored in a central place in your code. Caching is key, so use it. And, if you need a phpFlickr object in multiple places for each request, you're only ctor'ing it once, which saves on init time.
Having Read SchizoDuckie's post, I had a look at the picasa api for php, and found it a bit daunting to start with, however I found this sample code absolutely brilliant for getting started with some basic integration.
Samples for other languages also seem to be available - can't vouch for their usefullness, but suspect they will be good too.
These might be of help. They are mootools scripts and run without any server-side coding necessary. Both integrate with Flickr.
http://imago.codeboje.de/
http://www.moopix.org/
If you have any interest in Ruby on Rails, there is a screencast here that shows how to create a site similar to what you are describing in RoR.