Thread

Hello,

Another of my pre-sales questions (we will be buying soon, promise 😊 ).

For one of our clients, we will have a recipe section, with people able to submit their own recipes with the option to upload their own image.

Once approved by a moderator this recipe will appear on the site. Two sizes of photo would need to be created from the uploaded image, one as the main photo, and the other as the thumbnail image. It would also be nice if the administrator could crop and resize these things on approval.

The site is not forcing user login, and at first will not have any membership functionality.

After looking through the past forum posts, it appears that a combination of moblog, extended gallery plugin could work. The difficulty would be the image and how this is handled within the moblog, and the ease of a non-tech person to create the two different sizes and associate both with the recipe.

At a very basic level we may have to use php and gd to automatically create the two sizes, and send all information to an email which is then filtered and manually entered by an administrator, but it would be nice if it were a more seamless and smooth process.

Any help gratefully received on this. As usual we are trying to finalise costs and technical specifications before knowing what issues we could run into, and what is totally possible.

Adrian

Take a look at LogMeIn.

Thanks Michael.

This along with Gallery Extended plugin for the image uploads should be OK, although I am still stuck as to being able to place some information in a weblog and the images in a gallery. I guess you need to capture the text information first in a SAEF, and put in in a weblog, then pass the user to an upload image form. Can I get the last uploaded id (something like mysql_insert_id) to obtain the weblog id to then associate with the gallery, or am I overcomplicating this?

Adrian

I guess if it were me I’d push back on the membership issue as you’re going a long way around to meet that requirement.  I’d be concerned about spam/junk submissions from any form that’s usable by non-registered users.

And I’m not understanding the need to put images in a gallery - why not just store them in the weblog along with the recipe? (Ah - was it for the image manipulation tools?)

You could use the image resizer plug-in to dynamically create the thumbnail.

If I can chime in here I would definitely say do as Michael has said on this one. I do this kind of thing at the moment on a very large web-site that I am creating where we are going to have literally thousands of very very high resolution / high end photographs by world-class photographers.

The way I am handling this at the moment may seem a little strange to some people but is absolutely perfect for me. 😉

I have a Freeform form set up to send to a moblog e-mail address which in turn uses Freeform to upload the image and then the textual parts of the entry are sent on to the moblog. This means that the image has been uploaded for me automatically by the person just choosing a file in a standard file dialogue box and then the text is placed into the weblog using the moblog.

The entries are automatically set to closed as their status so that I can immediately see new entries and go in and check them out at my hearts content. I then use the ImageSizer plugin to re-size the images, admittedly this is after I have downloaded and checked them out first though as this is a very high end website where quality is of paramount performance.

Yes doing it this way you don’t get the tools available in the Gallery Module but if I may say so the Gallery Module is not really meant for anything other than really simple galleries. If you want to do anything of substance then a weblog is definitely going to win every single time hands down.

I would also go along with Michael’s sentiment about getting people to register first though as you may start to see lots of spam form submissions but that really is down to your choice although if it were me it would be something I would think about.

Don’t know if any of that helps at all?

Best wishes,

Mark

Thank you for your responses Mark/Michael.

I think to upload straight into the weblog would be a lot better, but as I understood it, file uploading through a SAEF would just use the same window as the CP so I would be concerned about allowing access to all images, and folders.

As I won’t be the one to administer the site I want to try and automate the process of the photo resizing of the uploaded image into the two different sizes on the site, and inserting their urls into the two fields for that weblog, so all an admin has to do is check the information and change the ‘status’ field.

Forcing the user to register before submitting is not ideal for the client, although optional membership is something we would look at for a phase 2 development stage. We would probably be using CAPTCHA functionality if SPAM concerns were an issue.

The moblog/freeform route is something I have looked at, but seems a little long-winded at the moment.

The Freeform / Moblog route I can guarantee once you get it up and running is a lot quicker. I have used every single option available for file uploads and using this you literally just have a form where a person chooses the file from their hard drive with a standard file select dialogue which they will be used to. They don’t get the file upload panel which you would get if using a SAEF which is great as then they don’t have a chance to muck things up and after they have chosen their image file they just type in their text into standard form fields. It really is that simple!

Obviously using this method you are going to need to do one of two things. Either make sure the person uploading an image doesn’t upload a gigantic image although you can limit that using the file upload preferences which Freeform should adhere to or you can download the images once they have been uploaded and then re-size them to the largest image you are going to need on the site. The Image Sizer plugin can then do the rest for you.

Hope you get something sorted soon though that best suits you but I can vouch for this method hands down not only because I kind of invented it 😉 but also because I have used every other method known to mankind and none works as easy and as straightforward as this for the end user once you have it all set up.

Best wishes,

Mark

Sounds good Mark. Once I get some time to have a play with this, I may be in touch if I have problems.

Adrian

Sounds good Mark. Once I get some time to have a play with this, I may be in touch if I have problems.

Adrian

Well I plonked myself into that one didn’t I? Hourly rate is £3,000,000 so no problem there…

… only kidding! It’s all fairly straight forward actually if you just use each part on its own first to see how they work and then integrate them together you can get something really nice for all your efforts 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks for the always detailed posts Mark.. I’ll need to get in touch with you sometime so you can recommend me some routes to go in regards to my foundation for my sites. 😊

I just wanted to point out that if you are interested in a traditional file upload, Leevi Graham has developed LG SAEF File Upload, that is meant to do exactly that.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I surely will sooner or later. My site requirements are more or less similar to yours, so I’ll keep you posted once I get around to it.

Cheers,
Danny

Thanks for the always detailed posts Mark.. I’ll need to get in touch with you sometime so you can recommend me some routes to go in regards to my foundation for my sites. 😊

No problem. Always glad to be of assistance if I can be.

Best wishes,

Mark