dman's sandbox: Imagefield magazinelayout

An alternative renderer for displaying imagefield images attached to nodes

Wrapper around the "magazine layout" algorithm described by
Harvey Kane at alistapart 2006.

This uses clever maths to shift a set of disparate images into an aesthetic grid-like rectangle.

Choose "Magazine Layout" in the "Display fields" administration for your content type on an imagefield.
That's it. The rest is done by magic.

See also Image compostion is an earlier module, D5 only, that is based on the same idea. The approach taken is described as being significantly different, development seems dead - and it's not built for CCK.

About the license

Currently this is to be distributed with a one-off LGPL PHP class.
This is not an active 'Library' of any type and was published in an online magazine as a proof-of-concept experiment. The unmodified support files in the full download have an (acknowledged & confirmed) security risk so it would be inappropriate to require users to put this on their server as-is.
Therefore the required code is distributed here rather than as a separate downloadable dependency.

2012-02
This is not yet very Drupally, it just pumps out the desired HTML.
Also, has no caching. TODO! compare with imagecrop and similar.

Can be refactored to add more intelligence, but right now it does actually just work!

Limitations

See the original article for background.
http://www.ragepank.com/magazine-layouts/

Currently it works best with up to 8 images.

No UI is yet provided to adjust parameters such as width or padding, though they
are easily tweaked directly in the code. (for now)

2012-02 NO CACHING!
Early code resizes images on the fly.
This needs to be updated before using it for more than a demo.

Desired:

• More Drupally theming.
• Link and lightbox integration.
• Beyond CCK imagefield to real image-as-nodes gallery building - so: Views integration.

However this is a proof-of-concept published only for a one-off demonstration. Not much further work will be done on this (by me) unless a real job requires it.
If you want to take it a little further, please ask to join in maintainership.
A Drupal 7 port would be easy - if someone wants to sponsor it.

A views-based version has been developed at http://drupal.org/project/imagematrix
"Imagefield magazinelayout" works on images that are attached to a single node (imagefield). Imagematrix instead provides a view renderer to do the same job for views results.