ImageCache Defaults

Project page - http://drupal.org/sandbox/thedavidmeister/1672224

$ git clone http://git.drupal.org/sandbox/thedavidmeister/1672224.git

Comments by me on other sandboxes under review:
- http://drupal.org/node/1694474#comment-6260750
- http://drupal.org/node/1696494#comment-6260824
- http://drupal.org/node/1684700#comment-6260890

This module is for both Drupal 6 and 7 but since ImageCache was merged into core in D7 it works with the core's "Image" module instead of ImageCache there.

Image(Cache) Defaults

This module allows for default images to be configured for ImageCache presets and/or Image styles. This module is intended to address two primary use cases:

1. The intended or implemented layout of a site relies heavily on images for its structure. Often it becomes difficult or disproportionately time consuming to maintain these sites in a way that degrades gracefully when those images are absent.
2. A developer working locally with an imported codebase or distribution profile wants to create a development instance of a production site by (re)importing a copy of the database but she wants to avoid dealing with the cumbersomely large files directory or the inappropriate/incomplete content generated by the Devel Generate module. Avoiding both can easily lead her to introduce new layout issues that aren't detected until after deployment (which is bad) simply because she isn't working with an accurate enough representation of the production environment.

This module is intended for developers who want to minimise that frustrating time spent importing and deploying projects with large files directories that contain mostly images. We do our best here to make sure this module works "out of the box", but still provides intelligent configuration options and is 100% exportable if you're working with Features and Distribution Profiles.

What Image(Cache) Defaults currently does

• Scans "sites/[site]/files", "sites/all/files", "profiles/[current_profile]/files", "path/to/imagecache_defaults/images" (in that order) for an image named "imagecache_defaults" and sets this as the default image for Image(Cache).
• Detects if a broken file-path is about to be sent to Image(Cache) to be rendered and replaces it with the default image
• Works equally well with ImageCache presets in Drupal 6 and core Image styles in Drupal 7
• (Optional) Allows you to apply a preset/style to the default image in addition to the preset/style that would be applied to the broken image
• (Optional) Logs a watchdog message to the database when broken file paths are detected
• (Optional) Remove all broken images from your markup completely to avoid 404 errors instead of replacing them with the default

Alternatives

For an alternative way to work around broken image links, have a look at Stage File Proxy (SFP) which allows you to automatically point your broken image links at a custom url but at the time of writing it has a few limitations that ImageCache Defaults doesn't:

• SFP doesn't check if certain files exist before replacing them so you can accidentally DOS yourself with it #1545912: stage_file_proxy should check if the file already exists, even if it's not an imagecache
• SFP can't remove broken image tags from your page completely
• SFP isn't recommended for use on production sites so there's an extra step in downloading, enabling and configuring it every time you reimport your production site
• SFP doesn't log the location of broken images to watchdog
• SFP relies on server configuration but has only been tested on Apache 2 on Mac OSX and Linux
• SFP requires the developer to have the same relative paths to system file directories on development and production sites
• SFP requires more configuration than simply enabling it before it starts working