Randomland.net - Test Site Discussion

[zourtney]

Oh yes. I remember that vague promise of "this feature will be implemented some day." It's really quite a shame, and made me frustrated because it was close...but not quite good enough. Then other things, like staring at the carpet, quickly became more productive.

Anyway, what do you suggest?

[Nick]

PHP and a template. I am not 100% sure on how to do it, but I don't think its hard. Might have to make it a module that works with the view (the module would just parse the URL and convert the names to IDs to pass to views).

[Nick]

A list of all the collections (30 per page)

http://test.randomland.net/drupal/collections_list

Can be made into a grid. Will take some PHP to get preview images for the gallery.


This is how we setup custom templates:
http://views-help.doc.logrus.com/help/views/using-theme

I will make a test one for the collections_list view

[zourtney]

Cool. I'm full of apathy today.

[Nick]

Did you do something to the test server, or did I break it when I was trying to make a tar-ball of all the sites?


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Ok, it was me. An unknown portion of pages are now .gz files.
Uggg. We should change the database password now.

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It might be fixed now.

[Nick]

I spent my lunch playing with some dupal API functions and this is what I have for a page that would list all the collections. It even has a preview image of the most recently added image for that collection.

http://test.randomland.net/drupal/collections_list

You will notice the collection-list looks allot like the view for an individual collection:
http://test.randomland.net/drupal/collection/18

Comments? Suggestions? Any way we can differentiate a list of collections from a single collection better?
Perhaps showing more then one preview-thumbnail overlapping? Like one of these:

[zourtney]

Cool, good job. This is looking usable

I'd say don't worry about the look too much right now. We ought to write a site-wide theme anyway.

But I've seen people use folder icons for collections; the highlight picture is a nice touch! Then use three fanned out folders (or similar) to show multiple collections. That's what pops into my head...

[Nick]

It should be easy to make a few <spans> with borders to make the stacked-images effect behind the 'highlight' photo.

There is currently no way of grouping multiple collections, so there would not need to be any representation for them. We would have to change how the images are related to do that.... unless you can add taxonomy terms to other taxonomy terms. Or use a child->parent relationship. I guess the child->parent relationship would work just as it is now, we would just have to make another view for it.

[zourtney]

Yeah, let's not bother with grouping collections right not. I don't really see a point unless we dive into an unmaintainably complex image tagging system (aka what I designed in college

I need to play with stuff on a bigger screen

Edit: and yes, I believe the taxonomy system has that parent/child hierarchy built in already (see ISO tags, unless I killed that). But I say that's too much work for not much benefit...at the moment, at least.

[Nick]

As a major player in the field, flicker might be a good place to look for inspiration.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14012135@N04/tags/

Their tag cloud is nice, and their presentation of lists of sets is extremely plain and standard. I also like their view of a set. Though I wold do it a little different for our format.

Now to get some king of bulk node creation going on. Maybe tonight I will try a little.

[zourtney]

Tag clouds are nice. A bit bulky, but still my favorite way to represent tags. Probably not entirely useful at the multiple collection level though.

[Nick]

I was thinking just having a tags section someplace to show the frequency of tags. Just as an exploration tool. Probably could do it for user, collection and site-wide.

Right not tags and collections are two separate fields. That way you can have a 'my vacation' collection and tag a picture with a green truck in it without inadvertently creating a green truck collection.  I think images should still be filterable/searchable by tags both inside and outside of viewing collections. Like wanting to see all the green trucks in your vacation collection and then wanting to see all the green trucks on the site.

But that's just what I was thinking. Who knows how it will turn out

[zourtney]

Any suggestions on what to use to display the tags? I could try to code these tag clouds. There are a few out there already, for sure. And there shouldn't be any problems, since the tags are just basic, flat taxonomies. Let's do it!

[Nick]

Have a link to a tag page along with the other collection/image links? Not sure where those would go just yet.

But have a look at this and see what you think.
http://test.randomland.net/drupal/collection/35+20

I got it to show the terms that were used to 'filter'... 'search'... whatever the collections. So now there is some feedback as to what the numbers on the top are. This will work with as many collections that one wants to stick together.

I screwed around with the templates a lot for this as there seems to be no way to do it with straight-up views.

So I guess all the parts now exist in a useable form. A little more tweaking should be done but I am happy with how things are as a rough-draft. If we wanted to start moving the site to 7 and worry about getting bulk-uploading done later I would be ok with that. Or we can wait for the bulk-uploading to get hashed out. I am 13.4% more comfortable working with drupal-guts then I was last week... so it all seems that much less daunting. And also make we wonder even more why such a module doesn't exist already. (For the bulk uploading that is)

BAMBLEDIT!
Should we make the
| TERMNAME | ANOTHER_TERM |
things into links to their respective collections?

[zourtney]

Dude man! That's pretty awesome. We can definitely work with this. What exactly is the node shown there? Something dynamically created by the Views module? A page with a query? Can we specify a special tpl.php file? However it's done, it seems to be working well. I'll have to play with it some time.

As for the blambledit: yes. Making those term names into links would be excellent.