After a very productive Horde Board meeting last week (see Chuck's article) and the decision to really focus on getting out the next 3.3 series releases, I thought it a good time to summarize some recent work.
My primary focus lately has been on Ansel, the soon-to-be-released photo management application. I have been busy adding some new features and cleaning up the code preparing it for release.
The latest new feature is the addition of what I call Gallery View Modes. There are currently two modes, "Normal" mode - which is how Ansel has been displaying galleries - and the new addition, Date Mode. Date Mode lets you set a gallery to be browseable by date. So, instead of a single gallery containing those hundred plus photos you took on your week-long vacation, you can use Date Mode and your images will automatically be sorted by date within that gallery. Some screenshots (click for a larger image):
The dates come from either the EXIF data embedded in the image or, if that is not present, from the date the image was uploaded to Ansel. While not implemented yet, these date values will be editable in the final Ansel release.
Gallery Modes can be switched at any time. If a gallery contains any sub-galleries in Normal Mode, they will be flattened into the parent gallery when viewing by Date. This is non-destructive so you can switch back and forth without worrying about losing your gallery structure.
A new command line script was also recently added, remote_import.php. This script allows you to upload entire local directories of images to a remote Ansel server. You can have it create a new gallery based on the name of the folder or specify an existing gallery on the command line....and for those of you that are Macintosh users, there is a simple Applescript wrapper included that allows you to just drag and drop a folder onto the Applescript application to upload the entire folder to your Ansel server. Plans for an iPhoto plugin are also in the works, but no promises on a time line :)
Some other additions include the ability to automatically add an EXIF field to an image's tags when uploading it, and something I've written about before, the ability to embed images/galleries in external websites such as a personal blog. In fact, the screenshots shown here are embedded from my Ansel server - and they demonstrate another new feature, the ability to view a larger size image in a "lightbox" while remaining on the external web site. This is really useful if you want to link to larger images from small thumbnails, but don't want your users to leave your blog page.
I've also added similar functionality to Kronolith as part of the sponsored AJAX calendar project. It's now possible to embed views of your calendar on external websites. The available views, for the most part, are the same views you can display on Horde's portal page.
For more examples of these embeddable widgets, visit my blogspot sandbox at http://mrubinsk.blogspot.com.
Ansel now has support for displaying a gallery as a "widget" within things like blog posts or portals. All that is needed is the ability to include javascript in your editor. For example, the following images were embedded in this post with code like the following included directly in the post:
<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/ansel/xrequest.php.php?
requestType=Embed/gallery_id={gallery id}/container=anseldiv1"></script>
<div id="anseldiv1"></div>
There are also a number of options available for passing to the widget. For example, you can add a start and count parameter to determine how many images to include, and which one to start counting at. You can also select to use the mini thumbnails (the default), the larger thumbnails or even the 'pretty' thumbnails that Ansel can display by setting the thumbsize parameter to thumb or prettythumb.
For an example of what this would look like on a Blogger site, take a look at my Blogger sandbox.
Like all new features, there is still some work to be done, and a number of different 'views' will be available such as a small slideshow and an image carousel.
Stay tuned!
In the last two installments, we looked at the basics required to interact with a Horde server and obtain content for display on external, or "non-Horde" websites. In this article, we'll take it a step further and give a concrete example of using Horde content to power a website - we are going to use Ansel, the Horde Project's photo management application, to power a personal, or family website.
Ansel is a powerful photo management application that provides many features. Even so, sometimes you just want to have a dedicated website to showcase your images...or maybe you want to integrate a gallery onto an existing website. Both are very easy using Ansel's api.
For this example, let's assume we are trying to integrate a family photo album into an existing family website. To do this, we are going to add a 'Gallery' section to the site, and for simplicity, we are going to use a "Lightbox" style gallery, so that when you click on an image thumbnail to view it, an overlay appears displaying the image on the same page. Gallery styles are a key part of Ansel, and allow you to change the look and feel of the Gallery View. You can learn more about styles and how to hack your own by looking at the styles.php file in the config/ directory.
So, let's get started. Let's assume that you have a number of galleries in Ansel and you only want to show a certain sub-set of those galleries on the new site. For example, let's say that you want all the galleries that have a category of "Family" to appear on this site. (It's also possible to do this with just a list of gallery ids you want included).
First things first, let's define some configuration stuff. (These should probably be in some sort of conf.php file and included on each of your "gallery" pages).
/ These define the root of the site
$base_url = 'http://example.com';
$fs_base = '/srv/www/example.com';
// The path to the Horde server.
$horde = 'http://another.example.com/horde';// Let's assume we want all the galleries in the
// "Family" category
$filter = 'Family';
// ...but only those owned by this user.
$owner = 'myusername';
// The named Ansel style to use.
$gallery_style = 'ansel_lightbox_simple';
Now, before we do anything useful, we will need a Registry instance:
define('HORDE_BASE', '/horde');
require_once HORDE_BASE . '/lib/core.php';
$registry = &Registry::singleton();
Now for the fun:
$content = $registry->call(
'images/renderView',
array(array('owner' => $owner,
'category' => $filter,
'style' => $gallery_style,
'gallery_view_url' => $base_url . '/gallery.php?gallery=%g'),
null,
'List'));
Some explanation: This calls Ansel's images/renderView api method. This method takes 3 arguments. The first is an array of parameters that get passed to the Ansel_View object that will be doing the rendering, the second is the application scope (we are using the default scope - if you don't understand this, it's not important to the task at hand), and the third is the general type of view we want to render (currently supported are Gallery, Image and List).
The various view parameters that a view takes can be browsed by viewing the developer documentation for each view, but a quick explanation for the parameters we are using for the List view are as follows:
- owner - We are limiting to galleries owned by this username.
- category - Only galleries that have this category are returned.
- style - Force the use of this gallery style.
- gallery_view_url - This is perhaps the most important one, as this sets the url that the gallery thumbnail will point to. You set this to the page on your site that will render a single gallery - %g is replaced by the choosen gallery's id.
So, what we have now, in $content is the HTML needed to render a List of galleries, that will correctly point to a page on your own website to view an individual gallery. Now, let's look at what it takes to actually render that gallery - in gallery.php (the target page we set above):
/* Grab the form info */
require_once $fs_base . '/lib/Utils.php';
$gallery_id = Util::getFormData('gallery', 0);
$content = $registry->call(
'images/renderView',
array(array('gallery_id' => $gallery_id,
'gallery_view_url' => $base_url . '/photos/gallery.php?gallery=%g',
'style' => $gallery_style,
'hide_comments' => true,
'page' => Util::getFormData('page', 0)),
null,
'Gallery'));
Again, we are calling the images/renderView api method. This time we are requesting a Gallery view to be rendered. The view parameters in the first argument are similar to the first time we called this method - the new parameters are:
- gallery_id - Yes, this is the gallery id we want to view.
- page - The pager on the gallery view adds a 'page' url parameter to indicate the current gallery page requested. The Gallery View needs the current page to be passed to it if it's not the first page.
- hide_comments - allows the hiding of the comment counts for each image (if comments are enabled in Ansel). Setting this to false or omitting it will cause the number of comments to show in each image "tile". If you do show the image comments, the text is linked to a Image View that displays the image along with the comments. By default, this links to the Image View in Ansel, but can be overridden with the 'image_view_url' parameter. This works similar to the 'gallery_view_url' - %g and %i are replaced by the gallery id and image id accordingly.
We now have a very basic way to render a complete Ansel gallery on an external website using just a handful of api calls. This article demonstrates the basic idea, but obviously leaves out a bit of eye candy.
Resources:
Some sites that use Ansel via the api as described here:
