Moa

An easy to use open source web
image gallery for PHP/MySQL

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Template updates Thursday, 02 April 2009 19:16

Written by Dan Brown

Well it's less than 3 days since 1.1 launched and we've surprised ourselves by having the template system for 1.2 half done already. The rewrite really helped for this as we had shifted most of the display code out to seperate functions already and just had to convert those.

We have gone for a tagged approach, similar to Joomla, Radiant and modx. The pages are broken up into template fragments which have a file each, they look like -

component_breadcrumb_node.html

 <div>
  <moatag type="BreadcrumbSpacer">
  <div>
    <a class ='nav_icon' href='index.php?action=gallery_view&gallery_id=<moavar NodeID>'>
      <img class='breadcrumbicon' src='media/folder_open.png'/>
    </a>
    <a id='nav_tree_<moavar NodeID>' href='index.php?action=gallery_view&gallery_id=<moavar NodeID>'>
      <moavar NodeName>
    </a>
  </div>
</div>

These new tags will get replaced when the page is generated. Unlike some systems PHP knowledge is not required for template designers.

<moatag> is used to insert a new fragment, in this case component_breadcrumb_spacer.html is associated with the Breadcrumbspacer tag. Some of the tags automatically loop, for example the BreadcrumbList tag loops through all galleries from current to the root and inserts one of these breadcrumb nodes.

<moavar> is replaced by direct values.In this case to insert the gallery id and name for each breadcrumb node.

We have the image, gallery, header and footer parts finished for the default template. We still have the admin and login/out pages to go but these are simpler so shouldn't take long. Then we can make a couple of example templates and will post again with a few screenshots.

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Coming soon Tuesday, 24 March 2009 11:51

Written by Dan Brown

Pretty much finished the code reshuffle/rewrite now. Everything now also goes via the index.php front page to keep the root directory cleaner. This will break saved links to galleries/images but is unlikely to change again for a long time. It is better to do this while the number of users is low and we can provide a way to keep the old links working if anybody needs it.

We have a few more bits to do before we can release 1.1 though. We broke Unicode support in the rewrite again so need to put that back in, and we will now need an upgrade script as well to bump up anyone that is using 1.0.

I've been reading up more on usability to try and get a better product and this article gave me quite a few ideas. One glaring thing we were missing was a way to add an image from the front page, right where somebody would be the first time they used Moa and wanted to be able to add one... We have some new features planned as well from user modelling ranging from simple (add image will let you specify a gallery to match tags with) to complicated (Image/gallery admin center to see/manage them all at once).

On the home stretch now anyway, 1.1 in a few weeks I reckon.

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More on Moa 1.1 Tuesday, 24 February 2009 22:41

Written by Richard Talbutt

We are making good progress on the 1.1 release.

Modularisation of Image and Gallery functionality is nearly complete with full view and editing functionality writen. This includes manipulation of Image and Gallery tags using a streamlined tag entry system. (No more flaming tick boxes :-))

Add Image and Gallery functionality will be looked at next in order to bring it in line with the changes made to view and edit functionality which have a more browser oriantated AJAX approach to them.

After that we will be going through the admin functionality to bring it in line with the modularised approach.

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Working on 1.1 Wednesday, 04 February 2009 23:32

Written by Dan Brown

We have made a start on the 1.1 code.

The first task is to make the code more modular. It was originally written as a load of functions scattered all over the place. We are shifting and re-writing bits so they appear in logical places and using classes in the javascript code. This won't add any new functionality by itself, but will make maintainance easier and opens things up to upgrade and add features much more easily than it was before. First up was the code to deal with individual galleries both on the server and client. This is now pretty much done so we will be moving on to the image code next, then tags.

We have noticed that with the new javascipt on the client it has reduced the number of server calls and it feels much more responsive. This is because edits can be displayed immediately while the actual server communications go on in the background and alerts the user only if something goes wrong.

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