I have a client that wants to post his product inventory (750 photo images and description copy) online. I have all the images in jpg and the data in an excel spreadsheet (CSV file).
Is there an action, plugin or template out there that can make short work of populating a freeway site - make catalog with thumbnail larger popup image etc. I am trying to aviod doing this manually. Or is there another program that I can merge with freeway? I don’t need ecommerce or a cart just an online brochure of product line?
You use the words ‘web database’ and that immediately says MySql to me - which is is the world’s most used open source relational database management system.
Now while there are actions for FW that can help you interrogate a MySql database and display its contents in a FW site you still have to populate the MySql database in the first place and there is a good bit of leg work involved in that.
FW will allow you to import all your data from a csv into a Table structure on your page automatically but you would still have to place all your images.
So there is no short answer as either way there is quite a bit of manual labour in setting it up whichever route you choose.
Walter is the DB expert here and I am sure he can help streamline the process if you want to go down the MySql route.
I have a client that wants to post his product inventory (750 photo images and description copy) online. I have all the images in jpg and the data in an excel spreadsheet (CSV file).
If you have the photo file names in the same line as the description that refers to them, then this could be very easy to do.
Is there an action, plugin or template out there that can make short work of populating a freeway site - make catalog with thumbnail larger popup image etc. I am trying to aviod doing this manually. Or is there another program that I can merge with freeway? I don’t need ecommerce or a cart just an online brochure of product line?
How many photos do you want to show on each page? What I would do for this sort of thing is build a template in Freeway, then populate it with the data you have using a scripting language of one sort or another. You could translate the CSV into nearly anything else – it’s a sort of Rosetta Stone of data formats, well loved for its simplicity.
Could you post a snippet of the CSV on Gist or Pastie? (Something that won’t try to be helpful with the formatting, in other words.)
Both are free, and very simple. Just open the CSV in a text editor like TextWrangler or BBEdit or similar, copy two or three lines, and paste where directed. Then if you put a link to the page that process creates here – all by itself on one line – the Web visitors will see it nicely formatted, and those of us who use Mail to view the list won’t have to wonder what you pasted either.
This is something I have been questioning for several months now, thinking I should give up and hire a college kid that’s flexible enough to develop what I need, work with me and incorporate into Mac/freeway.
Two phrases in this post get my attention, no, three.
Table, Data Base, graphic.
I have been seeking a remedy to all the above at:
Today I got an offer for $75 an hour from an amateur. I know i have the concept, where is the interface…
That above link is just a long table, same structure for spread sheets is it not?
Perhaps some of my queries were answered previously, but I was un readied for the answers. The language was still root latin, not english…
Frank H
JUST SAYING, this is important.
On Jan 11, 2013, at 2:45 PM, DeltaDave email@hidden wrote:
You use the words ‘web database’ and that immediately says MySql to me - which is is the world’s most used open source relational database management system.
Now while there are actions for FW that can help you interrogate a MySql database and display its contents in a FW site you still have to populate the MySql database in the first place and there is a good bit of leg work involved in that.
FW will allow you to import all your data from a csv into a Table structure on your page automatically but you would still have to place all your images.
So there is no short answer as either way there is quite a bit of manual labour in setting it up whichever route you choose.
Walter is the DB expert here and I am sure he can help streamline the process if you want to go down the MySql route.
Yes Frank - your site is a prime candidate for a solution like this and I am sure that Walter can offer a process to make the whole thing less labour intensive.
But in saying that there are no doubt a lot of ready made scripts out there that you can buy off the shelf to help you.
Lets say you have your data together in a format like this, and that all of your 750 photos are in a folder together.
name
filename
description
Ford
ford.png
Ford Prefect, not from this planet
Arthur
arthur.png
Arthur Dent, on a quest for tea, on any planet.
Trillian
trillian.png
Trillian (Patricia McMillan) much too smart for this planet.
Marvin
marvin.png
Marvin the Paranoid Android. Brain the size of a planet.
You have some choices to make at this point. If you wanted to show one photo per page, you could make one template for that page in Freeway, and then use a server-side script to funnel each photo through it when requested. As long as each photo was uniquely named (guaranteed, since they are all in one folder) you could link to a page like this: picture.php?photo=ford.png and your template page would have everything it needed to make that page appear.
You could make a list of links to those virtual pages by reading through the data structure and using the data there to build your list of links automatically. You could put that automatic list in your Freeway page so it looked exactly the way you wanted it to.
If you wanted to have a page full of thumbnails, or break the list across multiple pages, that could also be solved by a very simple script. (You mentioned thumbnails – are yours part of the 750 total, or do you have 750 of each?)
How you store that data is entirely independent of how you solve the problem. If you have everything in Excel, you can export it as CSV. That format can be your data structure all by itself (no need for a traditional MySQL database if you’re not going to be writing to it from the server), so you could update your folder (add a few images) and update your CSV file with the new rows that refer to those images, or sort the list in a new order, and your page would update magically as soon as you upload the new CSV file in place of the old one.
Here’s a Gist showing a trivial example for the data structure above. This creates a new DIV (HTML box) for each photo in the database, with an H3 tag below it showing the name of the character, and a P tag below that showing the description. It just does that over and over until it runs out of rows in the data structure (CSV file).
Hope this helps to spur your thoughts on the subject. There are any number of ways to skin this particular cat, so if that doesn’t suit, please post a Gist of your data and I can recommend another.