By vhmauery on

I have written a module that I would like to share with others. It is a photo/video/media album that was written for drupal from scratch. I know, I know, there are already several other attempts at this, but I looked into them and none of them were even close to what is needed. I did not reinvent the wheel in this case because the other options could not be classified as wheels to start with. What I wrote is not another album hacked into drupal or simply an attachment turned collection of photos. It is a full blown image/video album that can help you organize and show your pictures in drupal. It uses the filemanager module as its backend filestore. Each image/video/album is a node, so the drawing methods are all themeable via drupal's theme mechanism.

For more info, check out the acidfree page on my website: http://vernon.mauery.com/content/projects/acidfree
To see acidfree on a live site, go to: http://vernon.mauery.com/content/acidfree

I would like to share it with others, but I don't know how to get it into the contributions/modules tree.

Comments

laura s’s picture

laura s commented

http://drupal.org/node/7765

Laura
===
pingVision • scattered sunshine

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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet

vhmauery’s picture

vhmauery commented

I applied for one about a month ago. I got the email that said it was waiting for approval and they would get around to it sometime. But I still haven't heard anything.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

You can send an email to the infrastructure list. We find that often the email gets caught in a spam filter.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

vhmauery’s picture

vhmauery commented

I got a reply from the infrastructure list and they say there are too many media modules and are hesitant to add acidfree to the list. I guess he didn't go and look at how cool it is before he replied to me. If you really like it and would like to see it in the contrib/modules section send them a note and let them know. :)

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

It is very likely that he looked before he said no. The infrastrucure list is the place for that discussion and I am on the list. I have not have time to look at your module so do not know if it would interfere with image module which I use on all my sites and if there is an upgrade/conversion path or merely extends image modules base functionality.

Part of this stems from over time we have had competing modules and some of them became abandoned by their maintainers leaving their users with great difficulty in upgrading to newer Drupal versions. Some of them conflict with features in other modules and do not play nicely together. People want some features in module A and module B, but they don't play nice together. Now we have angry confused people in the forums saying Drupal sucks and such because they are confused and didn't pay attention.

The current direction is to encourage strongly people to work together to create modules which provide a base set of features then create additional modules that leverage that functionality or leverage the functionality in a more focused manner.

This idea gets everyone a lot.

  • If the feature proves very popular, then the base module can more easily be migrated to core.
  • Maintainers of the focused modules can more easily update their stuff.
  • Those of us who don't need/want feature B don't have to have it.
  • More people working on and maintaining some of the more important contrib modules which can be very important to people.

It does however require a little bit more involvement and communication on the part of some of the contrib developers. They must:

  • Agree on a set of minimum api's the are building functions for (shouldn't be to hard, whatever they disagree on doesn't get in :)
  • They must communicate with each other
  • define name space in the schema if needed
  • actually produce what they've said they will

So, if this extends image module, then great! If this is a custom implementation of what image module does, then well, does it play nice with others? Can ecommerce use it as a product? Can the images be used in a book? Will image_filter work with it? Upgrade/conversion path? (top of my head items not exclusive or inclusive)

I am not saying these are not insurmountable issues, merely summarizing some of the historical issues so you can be more informed as to the 'why' of the situation.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

eldarin’s picture

eldarin commented

Are the individual copyrights maintained like stated under the GPL (and most countries copyright laws) when modules gets incorporated into Drupal core, or are they just anonymously/silently "merged" ? Is this the case with other contributions too ? I know there is a maintainers-list distributed (which obviously could get changed), but I guess little copyrights go into the code itself ?

vhmauery’s picture

vhmauery commented

When I tried to use the image module, I was very new to drupal and could not get it to work properly. It was most likely user error. But I thought I had everything set up correctly and still nothing. So I dismissed it as broken. I looked at the other modules available and decided to write my own. I liked some of the features, but then decided that I wanted to write it not so Geeks would love it, but so my Mother-in-Law could use it.

Originally, it started out as a hacked in version of another photo album I had written. I liked Drupal for the content management part but still wanted my photos that I had spent so much time on to work. But then I didn't like that it was just a kludge, so I re-architected it, rewrote the code in what I thought was the spirit of Drupal. I liked some of the features of the other modules, so I built them into mine.

If you haven't checked out the code, here is what Acidfree can do for you:

  • Manage your albums
    • move, copy, delete images/videos/albums
    • mass updates (name change, lossless rotations, etc.)
  • Mass imports (of server side directories, or multiple image, video, gz, bz2, zip files.) In this case the title of the images/videos is assigned by filename
  • One-by-one imports via the node/add/acidfree page
  • One-by-one edits via the node/nnn/edit page
  • Images/videos can simultaneously be in multiple albums for those hard-to-classify subjects (this is what copy does)
  • Automatic thumbnail and small image generation — you get full size, screen size and thumb sized images for your viewing pleasure. And you can choose what these sizes are
  • Cron hook for resizing images if you change your mind about sizes
  • Three blocks — random, popular, and recent
  • A filter to add images to posts [acidfree:nnn align=right size=320]
  • Uses the Filemanager module for its backend filestore
  • A user interface that my Mother-in-Law can use and that others have said is clean, simple, and good. Both the geeks and (muggles?) alike that have used it rave about how good it is. Not to toot my own horn or anything. :)
  • There are plans for:
    • some nice search hooks to be added
    • more bug fixes (I know some bugs that you don't)
    • some more documentation
    • possibly some sanity checking for hook_cron

It might do more too, but I can't remember right now (early in the morning after a bad night sleep because the my 4 month old boy woke up at 3 A.M.)

But in the end, I did write it for myself and would love to see others use it, but I don't really want to fight the red tape that much. I am not going to get angry over this. I fear I already started a flame war in the infrastructure list and I don't want to force this in. If the Drupal contribution/modules section doesn't want it, fine. I will host it myself. I have a CVS repository and I can serve it how I will. If people want it, they can come straight to the source. I will definitly take suggestions on how to make it better, but I don't really want to kludge together video and image modules and hope that they work right. I wrote it for me and the rest of the flaming world can what they will.

eldarin’s picture

eldarin commented

.. someone will probably make an alternative drupal custom-modules website listing modules such as yours in these increasingly authoritarian winds howling [1, 2] around the place. There is also a Mega Drupal compilation which includes a lot of modules.

And noone should be effectively granted a monopoly on producing, distributing, maintaining or labeling their name on modules, in my opinion. It is simply so not in the spirit of the GPL.

Opportunity knocks when the gates close - just don't get trampled by the high horses.
;-)

bonobo’s picture

bonobo commented

what sepeck is saying about the history of contrib modules and how that has helped shape the current development environment, it also seems to me that if someone has a good idea, and has transformed that idea into workable code, there should be a place for them at the table.

My .02.

Cheers,

bonobo
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

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http://www.funnymonkey.com

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

and that discussion is occuring on the infrastructure list. Killes didn't say no, he said that based on the submission request that evidently did not have a link to the functioning module, he wasn;t sure.

We'll get it sorted out shortly. There is a lot going on and few enough available people working on things so some stuff takes time. Boris Mann has already said he will carry the flag forward on the issue and has written some proposed text and I suspect we will all have clarification soon enough.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

I couldn't find a download link so haven't downloaded it yet.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

vhmauery’s picture

vhmauery commented

I guess I didn't make the download link clear enough on the acidfree web page. Now that I look at it, it was buried in one of the posts. Sorry. So here is the lastest download link: http://vernon.mauery.com/projects/acidfree/acidfree-1.1.tar.gz

Note that this release works with the the 4.6.3 tree and doesn't work against the CVS tree. I am working to fix that. Pagers changed and I am not sure how I am going to deal with this. More than one release, maybe cvs access and a different stable branch? Who knows.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Thanks.

Several things changed in 4.7. Some are rather large things with forms handling and such. I will try and setup a test site this weekend.

On the cvs stuff, welcome to the community and it will get sorted out. There are only so many people who actually stick around and 'do' things at any given time. With the ongoing work to move more stuff to the new servers, code freeze, doc update work, real life time conflict, resources are stretched thin at the moment. I will also note that very very few people can actually grant cvs account access so requests tend to get processed in batches. Yours is at last comment in a wait state. yet another thing being worked on.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

eldarin’s picture

eldarin commented

... thanks for sharing here.
;-)

bonobo’s picture

bonobo commented

and this module looks great.

Very nice work.

Cheers,

bonobo
-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers

-------
http://www.funnymonkey.com

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

And have already replied on the infrastructure list.

There are some developers that have concerns about giving out wider access to CVS. IMHO, pretty much anyone that has a valid module that they want to maintain and distribute.

See http://drupal.org/node/30461 for where I'm trying to work on the wording.

For the record, I believe your module, even if there is overlap, should be included.

harry slaughter’s picture

harry slaughter
Location Omaha NE USA
commented

I wonder how many cool firefox extensions never would have made it to the public if mozilla made it difficult to contribute.

I have no idea what other album modules are out there, but yours looks very nice, simple, clean. And apparently it works, which is more than I can say for some of the stuff sitting in CVS right now (disclaimer, IMHO, FWIW, etc). If I ruled the world, any modules built in earnest that provided useful functionality, followed drupal standards, behaved nicely and didn't break other things would all be available to the public and everything else wouldn't :)

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jsaints’s picture

jsaints commented

I am currently receiving about 3-4 email requests for my premium.module (http://drupal.org/node/25229) per week. All email responses I get back indicate that the code is working great for people.

Managing updates and distribution of the code has become very cumbersome via email. My application for CVS access has been silently denied. Are there any other options or suggestions for breaking through the Drupal contributor vetting process?

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

You should have received an email stating if/why your application was denied.

Currently, the application process takes as long as 2 weeks (there is only one person that reviews them). As I have stated here and on the dev list, this is being changed. Please use my contact form to get in touch if you haven't heard back within 2 weeks.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Is there anything preventing anyone from using slashdot to manage their project if it gets rejected from here?

Uwe Hermann’s picture

Uwe Hermann commented

You mean SourceForge?

Uwe.
--
hermann-uwe.de | crazy-hacks.org | unmaintained-free-software.org

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

Just goes to show that one should not mix posting on web forums and strong ale! Of course I meant SourceForge, thank you :)