By saltcod on

Hi All,

I want to create a simple wedding website with Drupal. I want to be able to do two simple things:

1. display images in one big long scrolling list (like most photoblogs)
2. Let couples mark the images they want printed by "starring" them

For Fivestar to work, do images need to be nodes? If images need to be nodes, is the image import module the only option?

I've been digging around with image fupload and filefield and things, but while these seem to be the best option from the Views perspective, they don't seem to fit my needs exactly. Image fupload, for example, won't let you mass upload images twice.

Advice on image handling welcome. I've got a great idea/concept for wedding websites, and would love to roll it back to the Drupal community when finished.

Thanks,

Terry

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

Humm.....seems now like I can get my stars to show up in my View under my photos, but I can't select the stars. I can see them, but not select them.

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

http://www.lullabot.com/videocast/building-views-fivestar-and-votingapi

seems like views and voting wasn't as straightforward as I thought.

With the contents of this video, I can now add simple voting to the bottom of my list of photos to get the couple to 'star' them for printing.

aklouie’s picture

aklouie commented

Hello,

I've done something similar (although weddings are only one portion of my site) on http://www.alanlouie.com. Take a look at the galleries (weddings are in the People directory) to see if that's what you were looking for.

What I used were

CCK, new content type, Image, one image per node
Views, rendering in a grid format, you'd change it to a single row/column for your usage
Lightbox2, the 'click on picture and see larger version'
Imagefield_Upload, allows mass uploading of pictures which are all processed into CCK nodes (one node per picture still)
Voting API and Fivestar, I have it set for anonymous to be able to vote, but in your case, you would set it to authenticated users only
Imagecache, sets up the sizes of the thumbnails and the lightbox2 rendering

If you're using these stars for people to choose what to print, there is a module whose name eludes me at this time which lets them mark nodes as 'favorite' to them.

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

Thanks very much for the help and your experience.

I'm looking to do something very very close to what you've done. The problem is that there are 25 ill-defined ways to do the image thing with drupal.

Let me try and dissect your suggestions and make sure I'm being clear on what I want to accomplish:

1. I want to be able to create galleries for each wedding that are really long pages of images. Just like http://www.theblogisfound.com/ do with their pictures.

2. I want the couple to be able to mark their pictures for printing. This can be done by +1 or Fivestar, etc....doesn't matter how, as long as its identified which ones they want to keep.

3. I want to be able to give password access to couples who don't want their pictures to be public

I've got it working now in a rudamentary way. I can't figure out in Views how to put in some sort of argument so that only pictures from a specific gallery are being pulled out. Now, all pictures are being pulled out by the same view.

I am close though, I've got the galleries looking how I want, and I have Fivestar working underneath them to mark a picture as printable. The trick now will be creating a distinct 'gallery' or View for each wedding without having to go in and make a new view each time.

I'll unveil soon - it alreay looks very very good. I'm surprised more haven't written about using Drupal for Wedding solutions. Blog, image galleries, graded access, etc etc.

Thanks for ANY more help!

Terry

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

ps: I meant to get this clarified as well:

Should my images be stored as nodes? Or should they be just images attached to a Gallery node?

Images in Drupal is still a pickle.

Thanks.

aklouie’s picture

aklouie commented

I'll fire back at this in 2 hours or so when I get home from work and can actually get into my drupal installation. I can't quite remember which way I did the private galleries, but I did exactly what you wanted to do with logged in users only seeing the pictures

But for the rest

CCK - Each image is a node and has a title and description. You build the image part of it with ImageField as a CCK content type (Filefield needs to be installed too I think but that comes with the CCK package). The title is merely the node title and I renamed the body to be the description. For the vast majority of my pictures, I never bothered with a description since I bulk uploaded everything. You'll also add your fivestar here.

To import images enmass I used Imagefield Upload which allows me to send all the pictures to an FTP location then the drupal program will iterate through the directory and create an image node (the node created by the CCK above) per each picture

ImageCache helps you generate different sizes, so you'll want a thumbnails size and a full page size likely (looking at that link, you'll just want one that spans the width of your site)

So.. before you work the views you'll need some content.. so generate the stuff above and throw a bunch of images at it.

Views - You'll want a "page" with a "grid" with column size of 1. You want the fields of Content:Image (rendered by the imagecache to the appropriate size), Content:Fivestar. Display an unlimited number. Sort order your choice. Restrict the view to authenticated users. (and i'm remembering what I did for locking down access). Add an filter of displaying all images authored by the current logged in user.

For access lockdown if I recall correctly, I used Views Bulk Operations (create the appropriate view and group by node:author to help sort it) and for all image nodes added, I could change the author from Anonymous (which it will read because they were created by Imagefield Import) to the name of the user that i'm going to allow to log in and look at it. (and a pre-step.. generate the appropriate user account first).

So... they log in, they get a new little menu called 'My Images' They click that and it pulls the above view which shows all of their images in a single column with the fivestar thingy either above or below each one (depending on order of the fields). Ensure they have permission to vote and let them go wild.

You'll have another internal view for your own purposes similar to the one above which doesn't have the filter of logged in user so you can view all user galleries.

-------------------------------------

I'm pretty sure that's what I did from the top of my head adapted to your purposes.

--------------------------------------
A similar post of mine is on here http://drupal.org/node/128080 regarding organization of the galleries (it's about the bottom)

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

Awesome reply. THANK YOU for taking the time to do this. I've got things going now and things seem to be working well.

I think the last thing left is to associate the ftp'd images with a specific wedding - an album, if you will.

So far, I can:

1. Ftp images to tmp/images
2. Image upload lets me select all uploaded images and turn them into nodes
3. I can make a long, scrolling page of images using Views
4. Put Fivestar under each image (with only one star) to get couples 'star' the ones they want

The only thing left now is what happens next weekend when I shoot another wedding and get another set of pictures? I need somehow to associate each set of image with a specific wedding.

Again, thank-you for helping with this.

Terry

aklouie’s picture

aklouie commented

Associate it by user name. Create a user name based on who got married, use views bulk operations to add change all the anonymous to that user name.

Or, you can use Taxonomy and sort it by that. Either works and is equally flexible. I went by the user name because I could better control access by detecting the logged in user.

saltcod’s picture

saltcod commented

Thanks! I must have been dreaming about the solution last night -- I woke up this morning and realized I could do it with taxonomy.

I create two vocabs: One for 'couple name' and the other for freetagging.

I've never used Bulk Operations, so I may yet give that a try. Thanks so much for your help with this. I'll post back when I get it completely sorted.

aklouie’s picture

aklouie commented

Glad it's working out. Definately give Views Bulk a swing as it'll make mass tagging easy.