Hi,
I've been playing with og_galleries, trying to see how it works currently and whether or not I'll be able to use it for a site I'm updating, and I've got a few usability questions.
Question 1:
When you currently post a new image you need to select which gallery of which group to place the image in. The galleries part of the post form lists all the groups and associated galleries that this user can post to. In my case I have five groups, each with a gallery, for a particular user. The selection looks something like this:
Galleries
Select galleries to display this node in. Make sure you check the right boxes above to make it visible to the relevant groups.
GroupA Galleries:
<none>
Main
GroupB Galleries:
<none>
Main
GroupC Galleries:
<none>
Main
GroupD Galleries:
<none>
Main
GroupE Galleries:
<none>
Main
My concern is that even with only five groups the post form starts to look pretty big and intimidating. Imagine if you had 10, 15, 20 or more groups that a user had access to. In our case we'd be having "instructor" users that would have access to most of the groups on the site.
I see that a vocabulary is created for each gallery by og_galleries, so vocabs called "GroupA Galleries", "GroupB Galleries", "GroupC Galleries", "GroupD Galleries", "GroupE Galleries" are created and "Main" is listed as a term in each vocabulary, where "Main" refers to the default gallery in the group. My question is that instead of having a vocabulary for each group, could you have a single "Group Galleries" vocabulary that included the terms "GroupA Gallery", "GroupB Gallery", "GroupC Gallery", etc. and then any other sub-galleries as subterms under each? This way it could all be selected in a single list rather than having to be selected in X different ones, looking a bit like this:
Galleries
Select galleries to display this node in. Make sure you check the right boxes above to make it visible to the relevant groups.
Group Galleries:
GroupA Gallery
--SubGallery1
--SubGallery2
GroupB Gallery
--SubGallery1
GroupCGallery
--SubGallery1
--SubGallery2
Or am I not correctly understanding how you need to do this to make it work with the views module?
Question 2:
When you do want to post photos to more than one gallery, you have to make two selections, select all the galleries in the Galleries section of the post form, and then open up the Groups section of the form and select all the appropriate groups. Is there any way to make it so that when you select the gallery, the gid for that gallery is also assigned to the image node, so you don't have to make several selections?
Question3:
I've been looking at breadcrumbs too (with perhaps a related issue) and am not sure how the breadcrumbs should work when an image is crossposted to multiple galleries and groups. Right now a breadcrumb for just one of the galleries is shown, and not necessarily representing the path that a user took to get to the image. Ideally the breadcrumbs would remember what path was taken to get to the image, but I have no idea if that is possible... I imagine other modules that allow multiple terms or vocabularies for a node have to deal with this as well.
Any ways, thanks again for all your great work! I'm still getting my head wrapped around taxonomies and drupal, so I apologize for anything obvious that I may have missed!
Patrick
Comments
Comment #1
karens commentedI'm still working on this, but some quick answers:
1) The reason each group's gallery shows up in a different drop-down list is because each is a different vocabulary and the core Drupal method of displaying vocabs and terms is to group each vocab into its own list. This maybe could be done differently, but it would not necessarily be easy, so it's not a top priority. I realize the list is long if you have lots of groups, but I'm not sure of any other (relatively easy) way to do it right now. Perhaps someone else will see a way to do it, otherwise I'd consider that a future feature request that could be focused on after core functionality is working right.
2) I debated doing this, but wasn't sure if that is a valid assumption -- maybe a group gallery would contain some pictures that are also public? I haven't really thought that through completely yet.
3) There really is no easy way to do this either. The easiest way to handle breadcrumbs is to assume that each item has it's own breadcrumb, even if there are possibly other routes to that item. To make it possible to do this, an assumption is made, generally that the first possible or lowest level path is the crumb. This is the way most Drupal modules handle crumbs for items with multiple paths. Again, maybe not impossible to do it differently, but certainly not easy, so it's not a priority for now.
Comment #2
jarea commentedThis is an issue for me as well, because as presently constructed, OG Gallery will definitely not scale to the large number of groups that I anticipate.
A preferred approach would be to have an "add item" tab in the specific group gallery where an authorized group member wishes to add an item. An entry screen comes up and the item to be added is automatically tagged with the appropriate gallery category information.
Comment #3
jarea commentedRegarding pictures that are public or not, two settings are called for.
For the group moderator (or user with rights to create the gallery), a switch to make the entire gallery private to the members of the group or available to be viewed by the public. Thus, if the group featured adult content in an otherwise public area for example, the moderator could insure that only group members could view the gallery. If gallery private was selected, picture owner could not make the picture public.
For the owner of the picture, a switch to make the individual picture
Default (Public if gallery is public, private to group if gallery is private)
Private to Group
Private to Owner
Comment #4
karens commentedA solution has been committed for the original request -- I collapsed all the selections into a single select list to reduce the size with multiple groups.
The last suggestion is outside the scope of this module, at least for right now. My plan for now is to provide something similar to the capability and features of the image_gallery module that works with multiple groups. Once that is working reliably, I'll consider adding other features. You're welcome to go ahead and post that as a separate feature request -- it's really a little different than the original issue.
Comment #5
jarea commentedKaren,
Good to know. I'll look forward to seeing the enhancement. The second item was less of a "want" and more of a riff on your comment about "maybe a group gallery would contain some pictures that are also public".
Regards - Jim
Comment #6
pcdonohue commentedThanks Karen,
that definitely makes the usability more manageable.
Patrick
Comment #7
jarea commentedThanks from me too. A definite improvement.
Jim
Comment #8
(not verified) commented