Most of the newbies, including myself, find that building a website is a really frustrating effort. So I would like to share my experience in building my website, even it is not fully ready yet.
I just want to have a very simple website for my daughters. But until now, I found that there is practically no CMS that can be used to easily build and manage a very simple website. I have tried quite a lot of CMS'. Most of those CMS' are listed on www.packtpub.com CMS award winners and some others are not, like Xaraya, Unak and X3 CMS’. Finally, I decided to use Drupal as it is the most usable CMS amongst the others.
All of those have happened for more than a year. My conclusion as a newbie is that I am practically on my own, as only very few good people are willing to help me. That is alright as I have plenty of time. What I need is to search, read and try over and over again. But most of the time, it really frustrates me when I can not find any solutions. What I don't understand is that I am not building some kind of a rocket science project. So building a website nowadays is supposed to be a very simple task.
I have seriously started to use Drupal to build my website last March. I posted about 15 different questions in Drupal forum and issue tracker. I got only one good answer for one of those questions. I could answer some of the others by myself and forget some others as I found alternatives. After my request was considered as duplicate, I tried to apply a patch as suggested. Which in the end I knew it was wrong, but nobody says anything. Until now, after 7 months and thousands requests marked as duplicate, there is still no patch for Drupal 6 even the initial request was for Drupal 6. My God! It is just for a very simple functionality to have images in different folder for Image module. Please don't tell me again a phrase like: "we are doing this because we want to, not because you paid for something". Well... How about helping newbies to achieve what they want then?
Anyway... Up to now after 4 months, my website is still not really ready due to there is no usable image gallery module. If you wanted to have a look, it is thetwins.info.
Currently, it is using the Image module and its image gallery contributed sub-module. I want to replace that Image module due to fundamental reasons. I think it is structurally wrong to treat an image file as a node. If I wanted to have a node with an image, then I just need to create a node and attach an image file to it. Not to automatically create nodes for each of the image files every time we upload them, which makes us having thousands of nodes containing only single image file. And as above, all image files should not only be located in one single folder. Bridge module like Gallery module, is not an option for me as I don't like to maintain 2 separate applications. In the last 3 days, I have been trying to work out how to replace it with Brilliant Gallery which was just recently ported to Drupal 6. Of course, I experienced some issues. And of course, I have started to modify quite a lot of things. I hope this will be the module that I am looking for.
On the other hand, it is really not fair to call all of these craps, junks, useless or what ever. There have been tremendous efforts to make Drupal and other CMS' including their modules like what they are now. And we should also respect the developers for their generosity to give away their work for free. And of course, as their works are mostly for their own purposes, they would not exactly match with what we are looking for. So we should not demand a lot. The good thing is we have a lot of choices. And if we had the expertise we can easily change them as what we really want. Unfortunately, I have very little of that expertise.
Comments
Good Work
I think you've done a good job. The vibrant blue button colors seem a bit over the top, but all in all, I think you've got a good site (and great kids, obviously!)
I think you're on target regarding the frustrations. Best advice: find (or create) a local user group. You've obviously learned a ton, to be able to create that site. Maybe do a write-up of what you got working, and what you still don't have working.
It's currently harder to do a site with Drupal 6 than Drupal 5. Drupal 6 is still very much under development as far as contributed modules go.
Margie
Thanks for your advice Margie
Margie wrote:
Actually, I wanted to have the space between the header and the content boxes smaller, about 3 pixels. And have those buttons floating in the middle of them, on top and in between (I am not sure if I explained this clearly). But I could not have the same look when I displayed that with IE, Firefox and Opera without applying hacks on the CSS. IE mostly have problem with transparency colour.
Margie wrote:
Yes, I have it. They are our families, relatives and friends. At the moment, I create their accounts manually to have full control.
Margie wrote:
I have that on my To Do list which should be in the Site Info page. I still don't have time to fill that page.
Currently, it is using the
There are very good reasons to make a node for each image. Time and experience has demonstrated to web developers that it has to be that way. The answer would be obvious to any web developer, but you maybe want to do your own research on it. Try starting with the question "why nodes". Why is almost everything in Drupal a node? Advantages vs disadvantages. Read the documentation. Explanation to such things wont be in any "Getting started" tutorial, neither in any "Pro development" tutorial because it's an old design issue (analysis). What is a CMS? So everything is about "content". Why? What does all content-types have in common? If images weren't nodes, then you couldn't do things with like adding them rating capabilities (tagging, categories, comment, access rights, owner, description, search capabilities, relations, an so on)
A different directory to keep images?
That might be a point. But it's a matter of taste and software analyst decision-makers.
I would like not treating all upload/download files into the same folder the way Drupal does.
Why?
Because I agree all those stuff should be in one centralized place, but then public/private access mess things up.
You can't change the theme color if you chose private method.
What does color have to do with files??!!!
Everything!
When you change the color of the theme there are generated new versions of css, js, png, gif, etc, and all of those files go to the download directory.
This is the part where I disagree.
It should be avoided having side-effect on unrelated things. It expose a design issue.
PS: take in consideration having very tight restricted access to your child's info (photos and personal info) it won't be a happy end.
I won't say it HAS to be any
I won't say it HAS to be any specific way, but I do (as an information management guy) strongly recommend that resources be treated as first-class content items. Only trivial article attachments may be left as plain linked files. Anything else, especially images that are to be used in galleries or have descriptions or captions attached, should be able to be managed individually. It does scale better in real world sites. Although it feels like overkill to you right now.
I understand a little reluctance to have many new nodes added to the system, but that's just an admin thing that can be filtered in the admin section.
Yes, I agree that it would help to be able to specify your own storage preferences. That's why I wrote that patch fix ... that has unfortunately stalled a bit. That's mainly because of the D5/D6 divide. I've got no big D6 project on at the moment so that contribution is not being moved forward in that direction by anyone that wants it. That's just a time/resources thing. If a paying client wants this feature you are requesting in D6, it may happen faster. In the meantime, you are in the usual OSS position of having something that's almost but not quite what you want ... and not being able to push people to do things free just for you :-/
That's not to say the usual OSS excuse (which I'm sure you've heard before) but just that maybe there is no perfect, free, answer exactly for you right now. And that's all there is to it.
Sorry but good luck.
.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
Thanks but I have different view
dman wrote:
Thanks for your recommendation. I understand that. I am not sure if you saw it, but one example of that from my website is this. So I think it is not necessary to create nodes for each of the images especially from batch of photos, e.g. photos from one occasion. Caption (and maybe one line of description) for all the photos, and the best of one or two would be enough to have long description, unless some users asking for long descriptions of the other photos. At the moment, I see it that way.
I don't show the caption on each of the thumbnails in the gallery, as I think the display looks ugly with the messy long captions. So I only show the caption on the lightbox. Maybe you notice that some of the thumbnails are not vertically centred. That is one of my frustrations as I can not find a good solution up to now. If I didn't have any other options, I will just apply the hacks on the CSS.
dman wrote:
I am not complaining about why it took very long time to implement a feature. It is normal in the Open Source world. In fact I will stand by you if somebody demanded something for free without even trying a single thing.
I am complaining because, firstly the initial request was for Drupal 6 but no patch at all for Drupal 6. And a lot of similar requests including mine for Drupal 6 were considered duplicate with the comment "test the patch, give feedbacks". Ah.. ha? Which patch? This is some kind of promising something to a child but never give it. It would be better to state it clearly from the beginning, by changing the initial request for Drupal 5 for instance, and let the requests for Drupal 6 taken by somebody else or let them vanish. End of story.
Secondly, I submitted a silly (as I realised a month afterwards) patch for Drupal 6 as you suggested but no comment at all. I expected even a comment like "Hey you silly newbie. You can not do it like that. Have a look on ...some links... to understand Drupal's coding standard". That would probably take you not even a minute to write. Maybe it would help to move forward as maybe somebody else took the advice. As for me, I just gave up after about a week of readings Drupal documentations and trying converting the patch for Drupal 6. Then I searched and found some other alternatives to try.
dman wrote:
Don't worry, mate! I think I have a lot of lucks :)
I get the message that you
I get the message that you only want a few of the features that full nodes give you.
But you also want more than simple file indexing can give you. Which means you need to take the full-featured version.
folder-based 'galleries' indexed from filesystem
The 5% option.
Drupal page file attachments
The 10% option.
Drupal image.module nodes
The 80% option.
If you want to take advantage of even just thumbnails and lightbox (a 20% requirement) you have to take option 3, and are better off with images as nodes, not just files. And ignore the advanced captions and unwanted bits. They are not that bad.
There are work-arounds with imagecache and lightbox available, but it becomes pretty Heath-Robinson to do by hand.
And this doesn't even touch on things like Gallery2 or add-ons, which may solve different thing in different ways. But I understand you don't want to mess wioth that, and I wouldn't either. But that's only because I now understand the value of embracing Drupal node management.
.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
Thanks arhak
arhak wrote:
First of all, I am not a web designer by profession. It is just one of my hobbies. But I knew that there must be a good reason to treat the image file as a node after a lot of readings. So don't worry, I think I perfectly understand what is node in Drupal all about.
As you said, some of the advantages of having the image file as a node are to have rating capabilities, tagging, categories, comment, access rights, owner, description, search capabilities and relations. The thing is, I don't need all of them. Especially for comment, I think the comment should be applied to group of photos instead of individual photo, so I don't need individual node for every photo. As to the catagories, I think I can do that by structuring the folders. I think I can achieve that using Brilliant Gallery module (hopefuly). I don't like search engine indexing the images in my website. I am actually trying to block Google to do that. About access right and ownner, I think I can apply that on gallery based.
arhak wrote:
I am actually looking for a module to store the image in MySQL as BLOB, to have it more portable, centralised and easier to manage.
arhak wrote:
Thanks for the advice, but I want it to be that way. In fact not all the photos can be viewed by anonymous users, only by the registered users.
Not every glove will fit your hand
So, you are certainty sure about what you want/need, but the targeted audience needs otherwise at a 95% fitness (bad look for you on this point)
It might slow down your requests. Relational Databases aren't intended to FIT other thing than "relational data". An http request can be handle with optimization, the server can dispatch images from the file system in kind of parallelism. On the other hand queries are synchronous. How do you think to retrieve all the images in one album? That might be a hell of a query, an in the meantime, the client browser is expecting and nothing arrives. Being images in the file system the client browser gets images as they arrive.
good look!
I prefer BLOB stored in SQL database
arhak wrote:
Yes, I know what I need. And to be honest, I have got no serious complains from my targeted audience up to now, a part from complains that there are no dates on the photos. But I will also take your advice together with all the others above for my VoIP website (Asterisk+OpenSER), which will be a free service for public. Yes! I am building 2 of them at the same time with a little experience in Drupal and web design. I am testing my limit every day so I used to that :)
arhak wrote:
About 2 years ago, I searched for information about the performance comparison between storing the BLOB into SQL database and file system for the project at work. I found thousands of opinions about that, but mostly shifted toward the file system. My conclusion was that it all depends on the underlying system and the applications. As I don't have huge system like Flickr.com for instance, I use Lighttpd and have full control over my server, I prefer to store the images in SQL database. The main reason is that I will have it easier to manage, especially managing the access control over the images. As my images files are not huge, maximum around 2 MB, I don't think it is slower than handling the request from the file system. There will only be one additional SQL query for each of the images requested. Even then all the requests could actually be served from the disk by the help of Lighttpd's mod_cache or Drupal's Cache Router module. I have not tried both of them though :) So practically (or theoretically at the moment), performance wise it does not matter whether I store the images in SQL database or file system.
but the targeted
Oh no, you got me wrong. I was saying that the targeted audience of Drupal needs images like they are.
You know well what you need (and your audience needs) but projects like yours are not representative (5% maybe 10% top)
So, you are not lucky because whatever you seek in a Drupal's module will be over your needs.
Sorry and you are right
arhak wrote:
Sorry for that. I thought we were talking about the same audience.
arhak wrote:
Exactly! What I thought after trying a lot of CMS' was to build my own CMS. As all of them are still too much for my need even after I stripped down all the unnecessary modules. But I didn't even start that as I don't have any experience in PHP programming. :(
watch out... lol
Watch out, Drupal started as a tiny... ¿CMS? not even that!
Once you learn PHP, start growing your site... you will be doing a CMS for sure. lol
For now, good look in your TinyCMS project !!!
The name has been taken
arhak wrote:
Thanks a lot, but I am using Drupal :) Or are you suggesting a name of a CMS? Unfortunately the name TinyCMS has been taken. I have never tried it though as it does not support any SQL databases.
But actually, the word Tiny is the master key word which started all of these. It was started when I wanted to make my WLAN router more usable than only being a router. It is a long story which I will put on my website. But I think you can guess why I want to have everything squeezed.
BLOBs (and the bad old days)
Thinking back about 4 or 5 years (it's a bit fuzzy), the Drupal contrib module for file uploads (I don't think Drupal core had uploads back then) was called filestore and it worked by storing BLOBs in the database. As an aside... it's a bit weird thinking back to those days when you knew what every contrib module did :)
It caused me quite a few hassles and I was glad to see filestore2 (and the fscache module) which used the filesystem to store the files. But in saying that, the problems were probably more to do with MySQL 3.x and its many limitations than BLOBs in general.
Maybe BLOBs would work better these days? Personally I think I'd still prefer files though.
--
Anton
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Still not complete, achieved one but another is still missing
Though it has been almost a month since I started this thread, my website is still not fully complete yet. But it looks like I am on target in having the image gallery which is very close to the one I explained here. It took me quite a long time to reach this point. Even I always spend 2 to 3 hours every night and more on the week ends, mostly just for reading the documentations.
One thing I achieved is that, I have finally managed to build an image gallery, to replace the Image module and its contributed Image Gallery sub-module. It is using the Brilliant Gallery module (with quite a lot of modifications). And the thing that was really holding my back for almost 2 weeks was this problem. But because of that, now I seem to understand how hook_nodeapi actually works.
The Brilliant Gallery module is actually not such a gallery that I imagined before. It is basically just a module to display images under one specific folder. So it can not manage images inside hierarchical folders. Because of that, I had to modify it and add that functionality, including the functionality to display single image file which I use to display every images a part from the logos and all other images on the style sheet file.
My modifications make the module grows to almost double of its original size, in term of number of lines. Possibly that is because of I still can not write efficient PHP codes. Even I actually hardcoded almost all parameters, such as the ones which possibly can be moved to the style sheet file. Well, I think I will see how it goes first, then clean and split that into sub-modules later.
With this modified Brilliant Gallery module and exactly the same content, my image gallery seems to be faster to load than with Image module. I didn't do any benchmarking though, so maybe that is just my feeling after finally managed to have an image gallery that I want. But for sure, I can now easily manage the image files, such as adding and deleting bunch of them without even touching the admin area. I have to create nodes though, for each additional folders added to the tree folders.
One thing that is still missing is the functionality to display video clip files. I am thinking of using FFMPEG. But I would like to have exactly the same format of display like the image gallery, where the streaming view will be displayed on Lightbox (or similar to that) instead of static on the node, like in YouTube.com or in some implementations of FFMPEG that I know. I would really appreciate if somebody could give me some hints on this.
I think this one will need longer time as I still have no video clips yet. I have to first pull them out of the MiniDV tapes and edit them. So I think I will need more than just another 3 week ends :(
Well, Brilliant Gallery
Well, Brilliant Gallery seems nice.. You might wanna check out FastGallery as well.
There is also acidfree module back on drupal 5. It's actually quite nice. Tried the 4.7 version but got hit on the IE6 issues. If I'm not mistaken it also has support for video.
To be honest, you could just do away with image and image_gallery module. But i guess, you're not contented with them :D. I'd say they actually do their job quite well. The only one thing i'm dissatisfied with is it's lack of imagecache module.
The one I'm planning on using right now is the imagecache solution categorized with taxonomy. Though i've noticed some issues with it, like breadcrumbs problem and the ability to only have one level of galleries (There are workarounds, but.. I'm not contented with it :P).
PS: Another solution would be to use flickr. Ever check it out?
EtradingGallery
-=- Jhon -=-
Thanks Jhon, but my gallery ...
Thanks a lot for your suggestions. But my gallery is starting to have a shape now. So I will not change that as it took me quite some time to get to this point.
I have actually tried the modules you have suggested (and also the others), a part from Acidfree as it is only for Drupal 5, and Flickr as it is used to access the images on Flickr's site not locally stored images.
The Fast Gallery and ImageCache are too complicated for me to modify and maintain due to their strong relation with other modules, which make them hard for me to maintain. And I thought it will be hard to modify them to fit my future plan, which is to store the images in SQL database.
Particularly about your below comment:
The Image and Image gallery modules are the modules that I have used for quite a long time, until I replaced those 2 weeks ago. I have tried to modify them to fit my need, but it was very complicated due to the fundamental reasons that I explained at the beginning. So I have to disagree with your comment that they can do the job quite well.
We can indeed have the same look on the users' side using any gallery modules (not only Image and Image gallery modules), but not at the backend side, especially about the maintainability of the images. Even if Image module could handle the images stored in hierarchical folders, it would be really a pain to modify and move around the images because everything has to be done from the admin area. We can not easily add, delete, rename and move the images directly on the folders, even within the existing folders tree. And if we used URL aliases, it will be really time consuming to have structured URL aliases as we had to do that for each individual image because each of them is treated as a node. I am not sure if I should go on and on moaning about this :)
One thing about my (future) video gallery, I am thinking of just using the Lightbox2 video feature. Lets see how it goes.