Hey guys,
I know a lot of people have been talking about the Media Galleries and on the surface don't like everything all mixed together, but mixing everything together is something that absolutely had to happen. Having multiple media types growing out of control with each requiring a seperate core module just because they need different interfaces, is a normalization nightmare gone wrong. Using a single normalized core module is a no brainer.
The problem is that all media is accessed through a single interface (theme). Each gallery needs to have a theme setting so that we can have file galleries, photo galleries, movie galleries, etc. I don't know if this was in the original vision, but it should have been. The cost in time required to do this without themes for a site with multiple galleries of different types is prohibitive. This definitely is a must for CS2008.1.
Take it easy,Bill
P.S. The only difference between BLOGs and Media Galleries is that the post text is the most important item of a BLOG, and the attachment is the most important item of a Media Gallery. There isn't any reason that they couldn't be mixed together. They are both stored in the database in the exactly the same way.
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I think having themes available to the galleries would be perfect. I know at least 3 of my clients would use love it. I would also like to add to that the ability to auto create the galleries (as it was in CS 2007). I could do without the auto create if friendly names was available in the profile files.
I think this is a great idea. Thanks for the post Bill!
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Interesting idea, Bill. Thanks.
I'm absolutely in favour of "everything mixed together" - that totally makes sense.
But - at the risk of sounding like a broken record (do young people understand that metaphor? Probably not.) - what is killing CS2008 for us is:
AndrewOrange:AND they want to be able to protect their image assets through watermarks. Yesterday one of our websites received a press release from a company which shall remain nameless but should know better. The accompanying image was actually stolen from the website's CS image gallery. The user whose picture it was was not best pleased.
Can this not be done in CS2008, it can in CS2007?
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Dave: Can this not be done in CS2008, it can in CS2007?
Not out of the box, no. But they may "hopefully "come back.
As Scott says on his reply to my blog post "We are going to continue to refine media galleries and hopefully bring back some of the photo gallery features such as Watermarks"
No, it was never added back to the new Media Gallery.
On the plus side, it appears that Telligent know the Media Galleries are lacking in some respects, and Watermarking in particular appears to be on their to do list - http://engagement101.blogspot.com/2008/06/has-community-server-lost-its-hearing.html#comments, although I'm not sure how much of these improvements are inline for CS2008.1 as opposed to CS2009 and beyond.
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AndrewOrange: The compliction of their being media galleries AND profile files. This seems like a backwards step anyway (a bit like putting different types of media in different areas!). What our users want is their OWN media gallery (so autocreated, please) AND for their images/videos/documents/whatever to be in the same place as everyone else's images/videos/documents/whatever. And indeed, they want to be able to see everyone else's people's images/videos/documents/whateverin together (not by hopping from profile to profile).
Hey Andrew,
Since your other bullet point has already been answered, I thought that I'd just cover this one. I know exactly what your are saying and this is another perfect example of developers not using all aspects of the tool that they are changing. I also completely understand where Telligent is coming from. The true issue here is that Telligent either does not understand that one cannot replace the other for all uses, or they completely overlooked it.
Telligent is trying to make the Media Galleries like a globally accessible area that only administrators have control of, and this does make sense. It makes the security (permissions) model much easier to write against and for administrators to manage. They moved the personal galleries to the profiles as it makes it much them much easier for the users to manage. The breakdown here is that the profile galleries are not tied together in any way, not even to the main Media Galleries, which makes it impossible to create a "Community Media Gallery". Notice the word community.
All this being said, all is not lost. Since everything is stored in the same normalized format, a set of Chameleon Controls could be created or existing tools extended to tie all of this together. The only issue at this point is, do we add everything in a personal gallery to the "Community Media Gallery"? Or do we need something to say that only these specific personal gallery objects are to be added to the "Community Media Gallery"? Do we provide a permissions control panel to end users? This last one can become a major issue if users don't understand how to use it. Try giving Ben Teidt a nudge and see what he thinks.
i can see that having a gallery in the profile is a good idea but and it is a big but is that as cs started with a community gallery and many on here used it for that they need to have a way of keeping this as well. i really need to keep the community gallery functionality but having the option to have both would be brilliant. be best if the admin had control over it but the users also have the option to include their images etc into a community shared gallery.
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Hey slee,
Take a look at my post just above yours. It describes everything that you are asking for, but in a way that is much easier to manage. If the Chameleon controls supported a combined (aggregate) retrieval of objects from both the global and personal stores, then everything that you are asking for is covered. While the stores exist separately, they could be retrieved as one entity and even simulate previous functionality. The current issue is a lack of controls needed. The long term issue is, how should they interact?
ye that would be perfect i just hope it is sooner rather than later
I think this is possible now by putting a custom location handler on the media SiteUrls location, just like it's done for blogs.
The time consuming part I'd imagine would be rewiring the Control Panel to manage it, if you're into putting styles and whatnot inside those config files, or the database.
And you can mix the multiple post types together without too much trouble, just look at how the Search / IndexPostList works. If you can't bend that to suit your needs, you could write your own queries, List, provider, and data caching/manager classes to handle it, or a custom application that doesn't use ApplicationType in its queries.
Hey cpaul,
If I or anyone else was going to do that, then we probably wouldn't be using CS at all, now would we?
Also, if we did do ALL that, we would most likely be SOL when Telligent releases their solution to the issue. Minor patches are cool and addons are cool, but rewriting the application is not cool, nor is it a good idea. Unless of course you plan to permanently break away from Telligent's upgrade path.
Well, you can still gain a headstart using CS as an engine even if you need extensive changes.
Changing the Media Gallery to work like the blogs could be done without changes to the SDK, or at least you can work backwards to revert the blog section to work like the other areas with minimal effort.
Creating a new application to pull data from mulitple application sources could again be done without a change to the SDK (Except possibly to add an ApplicationType if you don't want to usurp an existing one), but would be much more work. And you're correct, while you could easily roll changes in the SDK every upgrade, you would occasionally need to integrate some of these changes into your custom application, such as the way SP1 added the countquery into the builders. But, in the scope of your own custom application, you have unlimited control, and can bypass some of the normal CS architecture when it doesn't apply (such as the ThreadQueryBuilders when implementing a simple and predictable query).
If you can live without it, or have the liberty to just wait on Telligent to add it, then you probably should. Such customizations can be time consuming, and Telligent offers zero support on it.
AndrewOrange:The compliction of their being media galleries AND profile files. This seems like a backwards step anyway (a bit like putting different types of media in different areas!). What our users want is their OWN media gallery (so autocreated, please) AND for their images/videos/documents/whatever to be in the same place as everyone else's images/videos/documents/whatever. And indeed, they want to be able to see everyone else's people's images/videos/documents/whateverin together (not by hopping from profile to profile).
CS2008 still supports owners for media galleries like it did pre-CS2008 for photo galleries, has anyone tried simply creating a CSModule that creates a media gallery for the user on registration?