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Good morning everyone!
Here’s the “Monday Beta”.
http://foxly.ca/bp-album-2010-03-22-BETA.zip
Now, a few important points about this release:
1) This is a BETA with a capital “B”. The “core” works, but many of the config options are still being set by hard-coded values. We figured you’d like something ugly that works more than you’d like something pretty that does nothing.
Unless you see something bad in the actual source code, please do not post to the forum saying “Feature X doesn’t work”. We’ll have a release out later in the week you can do that with!
2) The purpose of this release is to:
a) Demonstrate that we now have “multiple album” capability working.
b) Demonstrate that we have “member tagging” and “keyword tagging” working.
c) Demonstrate that we have disk-based image caching working
d) Introduce you to the concept of dynamically generated albums, based on tags
3) This release does NOT have a database upgrade routine written for it. To get it working, delete your bp-album plugin directory, copy these files in its place, deactivate the plugin, and then reactivate it.
If that *still* doesn’t work, and you are experimenting on a TEST INSTALL, drop the “bp_album” and “bp_album_meta” tables from your database, then deactivate and reactivate the plugin.
4) To evaluate the beta:
a) Upload ten photos to your album using the “upload photo” option.
b) Click on a photo you have uploaded, select “edit” and then add the tag “test 1” to the tag field.
c) Repeat for several other photos, using “Test 2, Test 3…, etc”
d) Go back to the main album screen. Note that on the upper right-hand side of the plugin canvas, photos have been arranged into albums based on the tags you have assigned them. Click on the text links to view them.
e) Click on any of your uploaded photos, click on the “edit” link, enter one or more user’s names in the “Member tags” field.
f) Log in as one of the users you have tagged, navigate to the photo that was tagged, and note that the active member is now tagged in that photo.
g) Go back to the main album page. Click on a different photo. Note how the second member can tag themselves in this photo.
This demonstration only shows a few of the things the plugin can do. It also has the ability to tag based on X/Y coordinates like Flicker and Facebook do, and it has the ability for photo owners to remove unwanted tags and members to un-tag themselves from people’s photos.
5) We’ll have a much better beta out by Thursday or Friday with a proper GUI on it. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this beta and take the opportunity to experiment with the many new features we’re introducing!
^F^
@courtenayc – Thanks for the support!
It makes a long, long day of coding worth it when we know people like our work.
^F^
@Sadr – What is confusing you is the difference between a “release” build and a “development” build.
We are using what are called “agile software development” methods [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development ] to decide on features, build, test, and revise our plugin software all at the same time.
By using a concurrent versions system [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(software) ] every developer on the team has their own version of the plugin with the features that they are adding.
So when I say that something is “done”, I mean that it has been written and tested but has not necessarily been released yet.
Every few days, the developers merge [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(revision_control) ] our code branches together, and create a “beta” release. We then post it on this forum to allow all of our stakeholders (you guys!) to test it.
After we are very, very sure that there are no bugs in the software, finally we post it as an “official” release on the WordPress plugin repository.
We must be VERY careful about the quality of official releases, because they are automatically broadcast to every current user of our plugin, and even the tiniest defect could crash *thousands and thousands* of people’s websites.
So, the version being offered on the WP plugin website is always many steps out of date.
We’re planning to do our next code merge on Saturday or Sunday and get the 0.1.7 beta out for testing on Monday night.
Considering that we’ve gone from *nothing* to this:
http://foxly.ca/admin-screen-01.jpg
http://foxly.ca/flickr-mode-01.jpg
in ten days, I think we’re doing very well!
^F^
@Modemlooper – Yes, but not this week …
@Sadr – The features you listed off were the features from three days ago, when we uploaded that release to WP. lol.
Here’s the latest list:
FEATURES IN THE UPCOMING 0.1.7 RELEASE
1) Multiple album capability based on image tags. We will be mimicking Flickr’s image tagging, sorting, and gallery functions. Users will be able to tag their images, and create albums based on the tags they apply.
There will be two classes of image tags: user tags, and admin tags. User tags can be used for sorting and grouping images, admin tags can be used by administrators to approve images for various purposes, as well as for use by other plugins on the site. For example, on a dating site that charges users to view or upload images, or a realty site that charges realtors to post property photos.
2) The ability to tag site members in photos, with the ability for the photo owner to remove unwanted tags from their photo, and the ability for a user that has been tagged in the photo by the owner to remove themselves as well. The tagging system will tie into the @mention system within BuddyPress. Support will be included for “bounding box” tags on images as is done on Flickr (face tags on FaceBook), but the function will not be activated in this release.
3) Configurable thumbnail aspect ratios. There will be a setting in the admin menu that allows the plugin to be switched between “Facebook Style” AND “Flickr Style” thumbnail display.
4) “Perfect” templates – all of the HTML will be generated IN the template and be fully editable by the template developer. Image rendering functions will accept size parameters. This will allow template developers to dramatically alter the look of the plugin.
…
#1, #3, and #4 are finished. We have also added:
5) Advanced image caching. The plugin has a 5-level cache with configurable JPG resolution and size.
6) Three different template sets, to mimic the functionality of Flickr, Facebook, and “Generic BuddyPress”.
7) EXIF data read. If the uploaded file has EXIF data, the plugin automatically imports it to the database.
We *had* to add image caching, because in testing we found that with even just a few people browsing the site, performance on a shared server would be unacceptably slow. If for example you were on a HostGator $12.95 a month shared hosting plan, it would be about TEN SECONDS per page refresh with 4 people browsing photo albums. Caching brings that down to 1 second per page refresh.
****
…Still, just a heads-up that running large social networking sites requires *serious* computing resources.
For example:
-If your site has 1,000 users, and each user has 100 images of average size from a modern digital camera, it will require 200 to 300 GIGS of storage space to hold them.
-Regenerating the image cache on a site like that would take *two days* at 100% CPU usage on a 3.2 GHz dual core machine.
-If each of those images gets viewed 10 times, you’ll go through 2.5TB of data transfer, which equals a dedicated 10 Mbit connection running at full speed, 24 hours a day for an entire month.
-So just understand what you’re getting into if you’re thinking of being the next FaceBook …lol!
****
@Travel-Junkie – I will try and get you a code snapshot later tonight so you can see what we’re doing. Thanks again for the help writing this feature!
@Modemlooper – We’ll try! After we get 0.1.7 our we’ll get everyone to shout-out the features they want and we’ll pick our targets based on popularity.
^F^
@pcwriter – In short: no, not with the default BP template. Our plugin gets loaded “inside” the BuddyPress template, so it is constrained by how that template is laid out. If you’re using a custom template though, then you can put the output from the plugin anywhere you want on the screen.
@Gpo1 – Adding media attachments in comments as implemented on FaceBook is a major project. It requires a substantial amount of JavaScript coding and quite a few new functions in the plugin backend. We’ll get to it when we can, or perhaps once we release version 0.1.7 maybe somebody might like to *extend* our plugin to add this feature …
^F^
LATEST STATUS UPDATE AND SCREEN SHOTS
Here is the latest screenshot of the plugin administration menu, showing the thumbnail generator, cache settings, and template setup:
http://foxly.ca/admin-screen-01.jpg
This is on a LIVE site. The options shown are actually working.
Here is the latest screenshot of a user’s home screen with the plugin operating in “Flickr Mode”. Again, this is a LIVE site using real images.
http://foxly.ca/flickr-mode-01.jpg
When you’re on a single photo page, the plugin loads EXIF data from the image file and displays it below the image. But that template isn’t finished yet so I can’t show it to you…
Don’t worry FaceBook enthusiasts… your template set is coming up next!
^F^
@zestylemon – There is no functionality in BuddyPress for payment systems and very limited functionality for paywall “Gated communities”. So although the BP Album+ has the ability for a plugin to add payment tracking data to its images, there is currently no payment plugin to do it.
Of course, you could always hire a plugin developer (hint, hint) to write you a plugin that does this.
^F^
@Andy Peatling – Thanks for joining the discussion!
Here’s our feedback on your requests:
1) – Allow the creation of albums, add/move/delete photos in albums and albums themselves.
Most of this functionality will be included in the 0.1.7 Monday release. The only feature that may or may not be in this release is to re-order images within an album.
An important thing to understand is that our data model is fully tag-based. So in the database, both images and albums are essentially the same data type. To assign an image to an album we just add a tag to the image, and to create a new album we just say to the database “find me all the images with @tag”. This allows a single image file instance to be shared amongst thousands of albums if desired, saving tremendous amounts of disk space.
2) – Allow commenting on photos or albums (use the activity stream commenting system so it ties back to the stream and visa-versa).
We currently have this functionality working 100% in the current release.
3) – Add single photo uploads to the activity stream. If a batch has been uploaded or a new album created, show a gallery of thumbnails on one activity stream entry.
Single photo to activity stream works 100% in current release. Album post to activity stream will show the album’s lead photo. We cannot post multiple thumbs to the activity stream because BP’s activity stream format only supports a single image attachment, and we think generating a composite JPG or PNG of multiple uploads would seem strange to users.
4) – Add meta data to an image – title, description, date, geo? – perhaps just read the exif data too.
Meta data is added to the image using “System Tags” as described in our 0.1.7 features update. This means that not only does the image object contain all the standard data, template and plugin developers can add any other fields they want.
The function in pseudocode (not final version, we are still deciding on syntax) works like this: bp_album_add_system_tag(‘image_id’, ‘tag_name’, ‘tag_value’);
And then to read it back: $string_variable = bp_album_get_system_tag(‘image_id’, ‘EXIF_shutter_speed’);
*I will add EXIF data capability today, as two core developers have now requested it*
5) – Upload one or multiple images in one go.
We will try this out using the built-in WP flash uploader, but solving this problem properly for “photo sharing” communities is going to require considerable coding muscle. We need a “fault tolerant” uploader that can handle all sorts of network problems and ideally resize images on the *user’s* computer *before* sending them to the site.
6) – Tag members in a photo – add a “tagged in” sub tab to the albums tab that lists all the photos the user has been tagged in.
The function in pseudocode (not final version, we are still deciding on syntax) works like this:
bp_album_get_user_tagged(‘user_name’, ‘order_by’, ‘number_to_return’)
while (has tagged photos, the photo)
paginator, photo object data
(end loop)
7) – Allow photo attachments on activity stream posts – extend the activity stream posting interface.
This is the only one we don’t know how to do yet…
Thanks again Andy for giving your feedback on the plugin!
^F^
@DJPaul – Sorry. I’m just trying to keep things organized.
I’m trying to avoid making people working with translation to have to scroll through hundreds of posts of requests discussion to find an answer to a question like “Can you describe the concept of a cropped thumbnail versus a resized thumbnail so I can translate it into Spanish”
I can copy this discussion into the feature requests topic and you can delete this topic if you think it will be better. …
Groups will be *awesome* it will make organizing things soooooo much easier!
^F^
Re: *applies text-transform:lowercase* …. lol. . Too much RedBull before writing. Could you maybe edit the topic to lowercase for me… I think the all caps looks kind of unprofessional on second look.
@21cdb – This would be possible to add by calling the BP Album+ upload action hook. If enough people request this we can certainly add it, but we’re basically just going straight down the list and implementing the features the most people vote for in order of number of votes.
@draganbabic – Thanks for the catch. I will fix that immediately!
*** See how much faster problems get fixed when everybody looks for them ?
***@bobin1983 – Batch uploading with the flash uploader is being considered for 0.1.8
@Gpo1 – Tagging is supported in the Monday release.
@Travel-Junkie – Disk space quota is being considered for 0.1.8.
As for EXIF and image rotation, once we have 0.1.7 released, the plugin will be using our new data model and we will be ready for other developers to contribute code.
Would you be able to write code that handles these functions and contribute it to the project?
@Tosh – In version 0.1.7 absolutely positively everything will have an action hook on it, so you can easily extend the plugin. It will also have “Production Grade” documentation, as you have seen we have done with the “template developer” version we posted last night.
We are very enthusiastic about documentation.
I mean, if we have 100,000 developers using this plugin and we can save each of them 15 minutes by having properly documented stuff, that’s 25,000 hours of development time that can be spent making BuddyPress better instead of being angry at the BP Album+ dev team!
^F^
