thanks for this plugin. it might help me in my application, which is to provide album/galleries which can be edited (ie. new images added, taken away, etc.) through web interface.
That's my goal eventually, too. Perhaps you can help to
design/write this plugin? At the moment I'm mostly
waiting for a design "sanity check" from [[Joey]],
but any feedback you can provide on the design would
also be helpful. --[[smcv]]
i have two challenges: firstly, for installation, i'm not sure what all the files are that need to be downloaded (because of my setup i can't easily pull the repo). so far i have Ikiwiki/Plugins/album.pm; ikiwiki-album; and 4 files in templates/ any others?
Those are all the added files; ikiwiki-album isn't strictly
needed (IkiWiki itself doesn't use that code, but you can
use it to turn a directory full of images into correct
input for the album plugin).
You probably also want the album plugin's expanded version of
style.css (or put its extra rules in your local.css).
Without that, your albums will be quite ugly.
There aren't currently any other files modified by my branch.
--[[smcv]]
secondly: barring the CGI interface for editing the album, which would be great, is there at least a way to use attachment plugin or any other to manually add images and then create viewers for them?
Images are just attachments, and viewers are pages (any supported
format, but .html will be fastest to render). Attach each image,
then write a page for each image containing the
[[!albumimage]] directive (usually it will only contain that
directive).
The script ikiwiki-album can help you to do this in a git/svn/etc.
tree; doing it over the web will be a lot of work (until I get
the CGI interface written), but it should already be possible!
The structure is something like this:
- album.mdwn (contains the [[!album]] directive, and perhaps also
some [[!albumsection]] directives)
- album/a.jpg
- album/a.html (contains the [[!albumimage]] directive for a.jpg)
- album/b.jpg
- album/b.html (contains the [[!albumimage]] directive for b.jpg)
Have a look at ikiwiki-album to see how the directives are meant to
work in practice.
--[[smcv]]
In the current version of the branch, the viewer pages are
generated automatically if you didn't generate them yourself,
so ikiwiki-album is no longer needed. --[[smcv]]
i'm new to ikiwiki, apologies if this is dealt with elsewhere. -brush
This plugin is pretty ambitious, and is unfinished, so I'd recommend
playing with a normal IkiWiki installation for a bit, then trying
out this plugin when you've mastered the basics of IkiWiki. --[[smcv]]
You had wanted my feedback on the design of this. I have not looked at the
code or tried it yet, but here goes. --[[Joey]]
- Needing to create the albumimage "viewer" pages for each photo
seems like it will become a pain. Everyone will need to come up
with their own automation for it, and then there's the question
of how to automate it when uploading attachments. -J
There's already a script (ikiwiki-album) to populate a git
checkout with skeleton "viewer" pages; I was planning to make a
specialized CGI interface for albums after getting feedback from
you (since the requirements for that CGI interface change depending
on the implementation). I agree that this is ugly, though. -s
Would you accept a version where the albumimage "viewer" pages
could be 0 bytes long, at least until metadata gets added?
The more I think about the "binaries as first-class pages" approach,
the more subtle interactions I notice with other plugins. I
think I'm up to needing changes to editpage, comments, attachment
and recentchanges, plus adjustments to img and Render (to reduce
duplication when thumbnailing an image with a strange extension
while simultaneously changing the extension, and to hardlink/copy
an image with a strange extension to a differing target filename
with the normal extension, respectively). -s
Now that we have add_autofile I can just create viewer pages
whenever there's an image to view. The current version of the
branch does that. -s
- With each viewer page having next/prev links, I can see how you
were having the scalability issues with ikiwiki's data structures
earlier! -J
Yeah, I think they're a basic requirement from a UI point of view
though (although they don't necessarily have to be full wikilinks).
-s
I think that with the new dependency types system, the dependencies for
these can be presence dependencies, which will probably help with
avoiding rebuilds of a page if the next/prev page is changed.
(Unless you use img to make the thumbnails for those links, then it
would rebuild the thumbnails anyway. Have not looked at the code.) --[[Joey]]
I do use img. -s
- And doesn't each viewer page really depend on every other page in the
same albumsection? If a new page is added, the next/prev links
may need to be updated, for example. If so, there will be much
unnecessary rebuilding. -J
albumsections are just a way to insert headings into the flow of
photos, so they don't actually affect dependencies.
One non-obvious constraint of ikiwiki's current design is that
everything "off-page" necessary to build any page has to happen
at scan time, which has caused a few strange design decisions,
like the fact that each viewer controls what album it's in.
It's difficult for the contents of the album to just be a
pagespec, like for inline, because pagespecs can depend on
metadata, which is gathered in arbitrary order at scan time;
so the earliest you can safely apply a pagespec to the wiki
contents to get a concrete list of pages is at rebuild time.
(This stalled my attempt at a trail plugin, too.) -s
Not sure I understand why these need to look at pagespecs at scan time?
Also, note that it is fairly doable to detect if a pagespec uses such
metadata. Er, I mean, I have a cheezy hack in add_depends now that does
it to deal with a similar case. --[[Joey]]
I think I was misunderstanding how early you have to call add_depends?
The critical thing I missed was that if you're scanning a page, you're
going to rebuild it in a moment anyway, so it doesn't matter if you
have no idea what it depends on until the rebuild phase. -s
- One thing I do like about having individual pages per image is
that they can each have their own comments, etc. -J
Yes; also, they can be wikilinked. I consider those to be
UI requirements. -s
- Seems possibly backwards that the albumimage controls what album
an image appears in. Two use cases -- 1: I may want to make a locked
album, but then anyone who can write to any other page on the wiki can
add an image to it. 2: I may want an image to appear in more than one
album. Think tags. So it seems it would be better to have the album
directive control what pages it includes (a la inline). -J
I'm inclined to fix this by constraining images to be subpages of exactly
one album: if they're subpages of 2+ nested albums then they're only
considered to be in the deepest-nested one (i.e. longest URL), and if
they're not in any album then that's a usage error. This would
also make prev/next links sane. -s
The current version constrains images to be in at most one album,
choosing one arbitrarily (dependent on scan order) if albums are
nested. -s
If you want to reference images from elsewhere in the wiki and display
them as if in an album, then you can use an ordinary inline with
the same template that the album would use, and I'll make sure the
templates are set up so this works. -s
Still needs documenting, I've put it on the TODO list on the main
page. -s
(Implementation detail: this means that an image X/Y/Z/W/V, where X and
Y are albums, Z does not exist and W exists but is not an album,
would have a content dependency on Y, a presence dependency on Z
and a content dependency on W.)
Perhaps I should just restrict to having the album images be direct
subpages of the album, although that would mean breaking some URLs
on the existing website I'm doing all this work for... -s
The current version of the branch doesn't have this restriction;
perhaps it's a worthwhile simplification, or perhaps it's too
restrictive? I fairly often use directory hierarchies like
a_festival/saturday/foo.jpg within an album, which makes
it very easy to write albumsection filters. -s
- Putting a few of the above thoughts together, my ideal album system
seems to be one where I can just drop the images into a directory and
have them appear in the album index, as well as each generate their own wiki
page. Plus some way I can, later, edit metadata for captions,
etc. (Real pity we can't just put arbitrary metadata into the images
themselves.) This is almost pointing toward making the images first-class
wiki page sources. Hey, it worked for po! :) But the metadata and editing
problems probably don't really allow that. -J
Putting a JPEG in the web form is not an option from my point of
view :-) but perhaps there could just be a "web-editable" flag supplied
by plugins, and things could be changed to respect it.
Replying to myself: would you accept patches to support
hook(type => 'htmlize', editable => 0, ...) in editpage? This would
essentially mean "this is an opaque binary: you can delete it
or rename it, and it might have its own special editing UI, but you
can never get it in a web form".
On the other hand, that essentially means we need to reimplement
editpage in order to edit the sidecar files that contain the metadata.
Having already done one partial reimplementation of editpage (for
comments) I'm in no hurry to do another.
I suppose another possibility would be to register hook
functions to be called by editpage when it loads and saves the
file. In this case, the loading hook would be to discard
the binary and use filter() instead, and the saving conversion
would be to write the edited content into the metadata sidecar
(creating it if necessary).
I'd also need to make editpage (and also comments!) not allow the
creation of a file of type albumjpg, albumgif etc., which is something
I previously missed; and I'd need to make attachment able to
upload-and-rename.
-s
I believe the current branch meets your requirements, by having
first-class wiki pages spring into existence using add_autofile
to be viewer pages for photos. -s
In a way, what you really want for metadata is to have it in the album
page, so you can batch-edit the whole lot by editing one file (this
does mean that editing the album necessarily causes each of its viewers
to be rebuilt, but in practice that happens anyway). -s
Replying to myself: in practice that doesn't happen anyway. Having
the metadata in the album page is somewhat harmful because it means
that changing the title of one image causes every viewer in the album
to be rebuilt, whereas if you have a metadata file per image, only
the album itself, plus the next and previous viewers, need
rebuilding. So, I think a file per image is the way to go.
Ideally we'd have some way to "batch-edit" the metadata of all
images in an album at once, except that would make conflict
resolution much more complicated to deal with; maybe just
give up and scream about mid-air collisions in that case?
(That's apparently good enough for Bugzilla, but not really
for ikiwiki). -s
This is now in the main page's TODO list; if/when I implement this,
I intend to make it a specialized CGI interface. -s
Yes, [all metadata in one file] would make some sense.. It also allows putting one image in
two albums, with different caption etc. (Maybe for different audiences.)
--[[Joey]]
Eek. No, that's not what I had in mind at all; the metadata ends up
in the "viewer" page, so it's necessarily the same for all albums. -s
It would probably be possible to add a new dependency type, and thus
make ikiwiki smart about noticing whether the metadata has actually
changed, and only update those viewers where it has. But the dependency
type stuff is still very new, and not plugin friendly .. so only just
possible, --[[Joey]]
'''I think the "special extension" design is a dead-end, but here's what
happened when I tried to work out how it would work. --[[smcv]]'''
Suppose that each viewer is a JPEG-or-GIF-or-something, with extension
".albumimage". We have a gallery "memes" with three images, badger,
mushroom and snake.
An alternative might be to use ".album.jpg", and ".album.gif"
etc as the htmlize extensions. May need some fixes to ikiwiki to support
that. --[[Joey]]
foo.albumjpg (etc.) for images, and foo._albummeta (with
keepextension => 1) for sidecar metadata files, seems viable. -s
Files in git repo:
- index.mdwn
- memes.mdwn
- memes/badger.albumjpg (a renamed JPEG)
- memes/badger/comment_1._comment
- memes/badger/comment_2._comment
- memes/mushroom.albumgif (a renamed GIF)
- memes/mushroom._albummeta (sidecar file with metadata)
- memes/snake.albummov (a renamed video)
Files in web content:
- index.html
- memes/index.html
- memes/96x96-badger.jpg (from img)
- memes/96x96-mushroom.gif (from img)
- memes/96x96-snake.jpg (from img, hacked up to use totem-video-thumbnailer :-) )
- memes/badger/index.html (including comments)
- memes/badger.jpg
- memes/mushroom/index.html
- memes/mushroom.gif
- memes/snake/index.html
- memes/snake.mov
ispage("memes/badger") (etc.) must be true, to make the above rendering
happen, so albumimage needs to be a "page" extension.
To not confuse other plugins, album should probably have a filter() hook
that turns .albumimage files into HTML? That'd probably be a reasonable
way to get them rendered anyway.
I guess that is needed to avoid preprocess, scan, etc trying to process
the image, as well as eg, smiley trying to munge it in sanitize.
--[[Joey]]
As long as nothing has a filter() hook that assumes it's already
text... filters are run in arbitrary order. We seem to be OK so far
though.
If this is the route I take, I propose to have the result of filter()
be the contents of the sidecar metadata file (empty string if none),
with the \[[!albumimage]] directive (which no longer requires
arguments) prepended if not already present. This would mean that
meta directives in the metadata file would work as normal, and it
would be possible to insert text both before and after the viewer
if desired. The result of filter() would also be a sensible starting
point for editing, and the result of editing could be diverted into
the metadata file. -s
do=edit&page=memes/badger needs to not put the JPG in a text box: somehow
divert or override the normal edit CGI by telling it that .albumimage
files are not editable in the usual way?
Something I missed here is that editpage also needs to be told that
creating new files of type albumjpg, albumgif etc. is not allowed
either! -s
Every image needs to depend on, and link to, the next and previous images,
which is a bit tricky. In previous thinking about this I'd been applying
the overly strict constraint that the ordered sequence of pages in each
album must be known at scan time. However, that's not necessarily needed:
the album and each photo could collect an unordered superset of dependencies
at scan time, and at rebuild time that could be refined to be the exact set,
in order.
Why do you need to collect this info at scan time? You can determine it
at build time via pagespec_match_list, surely .. maybe with some
memoization to avoid each image in an album building the same list.
I sense that I may be missing a subtelty though. --[[Joey]]
I think I was misunderstanding how early you have to call add_depends
as mentioned above. -s
Perhaps restricting to "the images in an album A must match A/"
would be useful; then the unordered superset could just be "A/". Your
"albums via tags" idea would be nice too though, particularly for feature
parity with e.g. Facebook: "photos of Joey" -> "tags/joey and albumimage()"
maybe?
If images are allowed to be considered to be part of more than one album,
then a pretty and usable UI becomes harder - "next/previous" expands into
"next photo in holidays/2009/germany / next photo in tagged/smcv / ..."
and it could get quite hard to navigate. Perhaps next/previous links could
be displayed only for the closest ancestor (in URL space) that is an
album, or something?
Ugh, yeah, that is a problem. Perhaps wanting to support that was just
too ambitious. --[[Joey]]
I propose to restrict to having images be subpages of albums, as
described above. -s
Requiring renaming is awkward for non-technical Windows/Mac users, with both
platforms' defaults being to hide extensions; however, this could be
circumvented by adding some sort of hook in attachment to turn things into
a .albumimage at upload time, and declaring that using git/svn/... without
extensions visible is a "don't do that then" situation :-)
Or extend pagetype so it can do the necessary matching without
renaming. Maybe by allowing a subdirectory to be specified along
with an extension. (Or allow specifying a full pagespec,
but I hesitate to seriously suggest that.) --[[Joey]]
I think that might be a terrifying idea for another day. If we can
mutate the extension during the attach upload, that'd be enough;
I don't think people who are skilled enough to use git/svn/...,
but not skilled enough to tell Explorer to show file extensions,
represent a major use case. -s
Ideally attachment could also be configured to upload into a specified
underlay, so that photos don't have to be in your source-code control
(you might want that, but I don't!).
Replying to myself: perhaps best done as an orthogonal extension
to attach? -s
Yet another non-obvious thing this design would need to do is to find
some way to have each change to memes/badger._albummeta show up as a
change to memes/badger in recentchanges. -s
Things that would be nice, and are probably possible:
-
make the "Edit page" link on viewers divert to album-specific CGI instead
of just failing or not appearing (probably possible via pagetemplate)
-
some way to deep-link to memes/badger.jpg with a wikilink, without knowing a
priori that it's secretly a JPEG (probably harder than it looks - you'd
have to make a directive for it and it's probably not worth it)
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