Semi-automatic Gallery-type Update

Freeway
1

OK. Obviously, I have NO idea what to call this thread!

So, here’s what I was wondering about:

I’m working on a site for an animal shelter. I’ve set up some pages where there are about eight animals to a page (small pic with brief description below each). You click on an image and it opens to a new window with a little bio of each animal.

Now, animals get adopted all the time. I’ll need to delete pics and their brief description and replace them with new. AND, I’d like to be able to not have holes, meaning, if a dog in the middle of the fifth page of the gallery, I’d like all the others to move up.

I KNOW this is probably a big undertaking, but I just wanted to know if something like this is even possible in some way.

Right now, I’ll be doing it manually (minus the "moving them all back to fill in holes) part. We’ll just have placeholders.

Thanks for reading!!

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2

Take a look at my screencast over at FreewayCast.com dealing with flexible inline layouts. That’s pretty much the exact sort of layout you should go with. Floated inline images will just float up to take up available space. By setting margin on the bottom and right, you get a neat grid of images (visually) but all of the element are just floating free in a parent box. By the way, there’s no need to make the outer container flexible, that’s just what I was showing in the screencast. A fixed-width container will also work fine.

Walter

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3

Thanks, Walt. I’ll take a look.

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4

Thar’s pretty neat, but not exactly what I needed.

I think I’m asking for the impossible…or at least impossible for ME to do.

There will be several pages of pets and one in the middle of a page will be deleted (or replaced) an I was wondering if it’s possible to have all the pages jog back to fill in the whole.

Or (or in addition to), was there some kind of automatic way to update the pages with older animals being adopted and new ones being added.

If not automatic, at least something easier than replacing one at a time as I am doing now.

Pic and text will be involved, not just an image.

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5

Now you are into the realms of PHP and MySql and file uploading and a web interface to your database - the ultimate aim I suppose to be that anybody could maintain this through a browser.

No mean feat and some serious hand dirtying - do you really want to go that far?

If so then Walter is the man to guide you…or Mike B and a shift to the Dynamo list too.

David

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6

Yeah, I figured it was going to be a lot of work.

I don’t have the head to code anything that complicated, so I guess I can bite the bullet and do it by hand.

The dogs aren’t too bad now, but there are at least 75 cats!

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7

That’s going to require some sort of content management system, I’m
afraid. It’s not a particularly hard thing to do if you know how, but
as far as making this even semi-automatic, that’s about the only way I
can think of to do it. Otherwise, you will have to manage the number
of pets per page yourself.

I would make this with a database, you could also do it using a flat-
file approach, where you have a folder on the server full of either
individual pet images (low-fi way) or little snippets of HTML that
contain the image reference and some associated information about
them. Then there would be a script to generate the pages, based on how
many images were in the folder and how many had already been “paged”.

None of this is first-time stuff. I could do it in a couple of hours,
I am sure there are others on the list who could do it even faster. If
you’re coming from a position of “don’t know any code”, then I give
you a week or two to do it, given a budget of $50 for books and a
spare weekend to get lost in the documentation and try something.

Walter

On Dec 16, 2008, at 5:04 PM, Robert Bovasso wrote:

Thar’s pretty neat, but not exactly what I needed.

I think I’m asking for the impossible…or at least impossible for
ME to do.

There will be several pages of pets and one in the middle of a page
will be deleted (or replaced) an I was wondering if it’s possible to
have all the pages jog back to fill in the whole.

Or (or in addition to), was there some kind of automatic way to
update the pages with older animals being adopted and new ones being
added.

If not automatic, at least something easier than replacing one at a
time as I am doing now.

Pic and text will be involved, not just an image.

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8

Max - What about WebYep - could it do what Robert is looking for?

Obviously not the automatic part but get it to a stage where most anybody could do the updates.

D

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