open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

altprint · 2013-04-03 02:09:29

Hello,

I’m a screen printer and photographer who is seeking to open-source all of my work and make it accessible to others – I would like to build a site that will do this for others as well. I use Wordpress with Marketpress for my store but I’m looking for something else for this project. Textpattern seems very capable – I will describe what I am looking to achieve, and perhaps you more knowledgeable people could tell me if this is something Textpattern could do well, and if so, maybe recommend some plugins or simple code-changes to get me out the door?

Basically, I want a site that can support users. Each user would be able to add an entry to represent a “work” of theirs. Say it is a screenprint. A single print would be represented by each color separation, a composite of all colors, and perhaps a .ZIP of all of it. It would be nice if a particular image could act as a representative of the whole work, and if these could turn into thumbnails so be sorted by user, technique, date, etc.

Simple file upload page, where users could upload each piece of the work and put the files under categories (ie “scans” “separations” “composites” “photo”) within the work. Perhaps a function to use zip libraries on the server to zip it all up automatically.

The files would be the focus: the intent of the site would be to get the files (art) into the hands of as many people as possible.

Each user’s page should sort all of their work in a nice way. Front page should showcase some users’ work (if there end up being enough people).

Since large files will be stored, it would rock if there could be some file integration to Amazon or another low-cost host (ie user uploads all the work, it is indexed at Amazon AWS invisibly, and my site accesses that to serve the files)

I know this is a lot. I’m not requesting anyone do the work for me, but there are a lot of plugins, and TXP has been around for awhile. So even if you could point me in the right direction or pull my expectations down to earth, it would be appreciated! Thanks!

Dragondz · 2013-04-03 09:27:09

Hi and welcome here.

Textpattern can do a lot of things it depends on your knowledge.

For what you are looking i think that uploading file thrue admin side is the way to go for you, it s possible to do that on front end but you need some work and coding to do that.

You can customize your admin using a plugin bot_write_tab_customize and manage your users using smd_user_manager, i think you also need bot_priv to tweek access privileges.

For the zip functionality i dont know how to do it, i never thinked about it.

Uploading file can have some limitation about the naming: each file must have a unique name or the upload will fail, you must tell the user to have a naming sheme that take care about that.

Cheers

Bloke · 2013-04-03 10:53:40

Hi and welcome. On the surface this project does seem like a tall order for any CMS — especially as it seems you envisage users being able to control things from the public-facing side. But as Dragondz says, it largely depends on your level of expertise and cunning. Textpattern is very capable and I’ll try to outline a few approaches that might get you where you want to go. The main problem is that there are a number of ways to approach it.

Firstly, you need to decide if a “work” is going to be a single file or may be a collection of items. Textpattern has Images and Files for sure, but they currently have limited meta data you can store against each. If that’s not a problem then you can certainly put some kind of file upload facility using any of the jQuery plugins around that could interface to Textpattern. Both Image and File upload are not an easy arena, primarily because you need to guard against malicious use, but it is possible with care. Sadly there aren’t many plugins for this at the moment.

If, however, you wish to store various chunks of meta data against each work to make them more easily searchable then I’d suggest using Textpattern’s Article as the primary container. You can configure custom fields to hold attributes of each work and perhaps use Sections to arrange each piece (e.g. screenprint) and Categories to classify the type (separation, scan, composite, etc). Textpattern currently only permits a maximum of two categories per article, so bear that in mind. I’m not in the screenprinting world so I don’t know how best it would work for your users, but that’s one way of approaching it. The advantage is that things are nicely URL-accessible too, automatically, and you can easily filter by category. If each user has a Textpattern login then filtering by author is also possible — again, out of the box.

If you have things arranged like this you then need to ‘attach’ other content to your articles so you can show them together on the public site. You can do this by using a custom field to hold, say, a list of image IDs/names or a list of filenames. Or if you set up suitable categories, you can do it by matching category/author and using those attributes to group things together. Custom fields are more flexible, but it’s up to you.

When it comes to organising thumbnails, I have a plugin smd_thumbnail that allows you to manage an arbitrary number of thumbnails for each image — Textpattern usually only permits one per image. This is an admin-side plugin though, so if you want to upload things from the public site you’ll need to find a way to trigger the thumbnail generation.

This brings about another aspect of managing the content. When you give your users a login they can either do things from Textpattern’s admin-side — which you can theme, and using plugins such as bot_write_tab_customize you can do a lot of configuring and hiding interface elements to make it a more streamlined experience — or with quite a lot more work, they can do it from the public side. Although it seems less friendly at first, I would lean towards customising the admin side rather than doing things from the public side. It’s just a lot less effort.

Once a user is logged in you can hop them from public to admin side and back through hyperlinks and if you theme the admin side well enough — and perhaps crank down the permissions using smd_user_manager or even use smd_tabber to create dedicated admin-side tabs upon which to offer various elements of the user interface — then users can remain largely oblivious to the fact you’re throwing them from one to the other behind the scenes.

Zipping content and unzipping it on the server is something that’s not well supported by plugins at present, but it can be done. As Dragondz says, a lot of the issues you’ll have with this will be down to avoiding filename collisions by enforcing a strict naming policy. Uploading large files will indeed also be hit and miss depending on your server setup and whether the upload exceeds the script execution time. You’ll hit that with any CMS.

As it happens I have a plugin (heh) that can interface Textpattern’s Files panel with third party cloud storage, although I’ve never tried it with Amazon AWS (works well with Fileden, among others). It’s pretty simplistic in the way it does things, and third-party authentication is not part of the deal so if you need to manage your files that way then you may be out of luck. The latest version (currently not publicly available until I get round to releasing it officially) allows you to store files “securely” away from your Textpattern Files folder and manage those files as if they were regular Txp files. But again, file size limits might hit you here unless you can convince your user base to upload their content via FTP ;-)

On the public site, sorting and filtering content, pulling out featured stuff, displaying images, allowing downloads, etc is all easily doable once you have decided on an approach on how to store the data in the first place. I think Textpattern can accommodate your needs: breaking the project down into chunks and figuring out exactly how you want users to interact with the site will determine the best method. From there, it’s just tags, plugins and (maybe) a bit of code!

By all means, shout here on the forum or on our Google+ community page for more specific help or to bat ideas around. We’ll do what we can to help out.

altprint · 2013-04-17 01:28:02

Thank you for the replies! I think now I just need to install TXP on my server and start tweaking it. I will start with the plugins recommended and report back if I have a question or run into trouble. I really appreciate it!

altprint · 2013-05-14 23:16:27

Hello again,

I am experimenting with a few plugins and etc. on my textpattern install. At the featured sites on the txp web site I came across http://www.louiscarre.fr/. I like that – it is a site for a gallery, and the artists have their own pages, and each page features associated works of the artist. Each work opens up a page with a larger picture. Picture navigation controls (next, previous, etc) sit at the top and bottom of these display pages. I think with a few changes something in this vein might work out for me.

Can anyone figure out what plugins they are using, or if their setup has been modified beyond plugins? Thanks.

AP

uli · 2013-05-15 19:11:43

altprint wrote:

Can anyone figure out what plugins they are using, or if their setup has been modified beyond plugins?

Aside from URL manipulation (see http://www.louiscarre.fr/oeuvres/Camacho/3, probably done with gbp_permanent_links) I didn’t spot anything unusual at first sight. But the devil is always in the details. Just ask when you’re stuck recreating anything.

Just remembered that this gallery tutorial got lots of praise. Perhaps good to start with. Please note that the upm_image plugin isn’t necessary any longer and can be replaced by core image tags.

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#1 2013-04-03 02:09:29

open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

#2 2013-04-03 09:27:09

Re: open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

#3 2013-04-03 10:53:40

Re: open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

#4 2013-04-17 01:28:02

Re: open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

#5 2013-05-14 23:16:27

Re: open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

#6 2013-05-15 19:11:43

Re: open-source art-print upload site...is textpattern a good choice?

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