Missing Picasa Save and Delete buttons

Fixed the issue

I've changed this issue from a support request to a bug report for the following reason:

When the preview post option is set to "required" in D6 core "post settings" the picasa save and delete buttons are not rendered on the UI. The quick fix is to set the preview post option to "optional" then everything works fine. However this may not be a suitable option for many websites. I personally prefer to force users to preview their posts before submission to the website.

I therefore think this is a bug in the picasa module.

When the preview post option is set to "required" in D6 core "post settings" the picasa save and delete buttons are not rendered on the UI. The quick fix is to set the preview post option to "optional" then everything works fine. However this may not be a suitable option for many websites. I personally prefer to force users to preview their posts before submission to the website.

hmmm I missed a case that allows the preview buttons to show up ... I'll make sure to correct that. :)

So, here's the trick ... when your creating an image or album using this module your doing two things simultaneously. Your creating a Drupal node, but you are also interacting with the Picasa API and creating entries in Picasa. In order to preview the node you need to have data to preview ... which means the image needs to be stored somewhere. Typically, in Drupal, this is relatively easy because you are dealing with a file that has been uploaded to the server. With this module there is no file that is uploaded to the server ... it's uploaded to the Picasa API. In order to upload something to Picasa you have to create that entry in Picasa .. there is no "preview" for Picasa. Make sense?

I could provide a preview button and write a lot of functionality to create the Picasa API entry to serve as your preview ... but what happens if the user suddenly decides they are going to navigate away from the preview page ... or they close the browser window? Your left with an instance where there is no node created in Drupal, but there is a new entry in Picasa ... if the image was uploaded to a public album that image is visible from picasaweb.google.com ... the next time the user synchronized, that image would come down as a node.

I'm marking this as a feature request instead of a bug since I intentionally removed the preview buttons. I'd love for some additional feedback that would help resolve this problem, but until that happens I'm going to leave the preview buttons out of the loop and am going to remove them from the workaround you describe if I can. I'm completely open to alternative solutions.

I know the idea I'm about to put forward may not be seen as the drupal way, however as you rightly mentioned picasa content types are not typical drupal nodes, there is a lot of picasa API stuff going on behind the scenes.

I agree that in the present state of the module previewing a picasa post makes no sense. That said I think that the picasa module has to gracefully handle the possibility of a site admin forcing users to preview posts. I am no drupal wizard however if it is possible, could the picasa module detect the core "user must preview posts" and effectively ignore/override this requirement and so provide the save and delete buttons regardless of the preview post settings.

I think that in order to provide a preview option the module would need to store the image on the server hosting the site similar to a standard image or file attachment. While this is definitely not outside the realm of possibility I'm going to continue focusing on the pieces I need in place to feel comfortable pushing a beta release. I'd be happy to apply and review patches that could help accomplish a preview option.