Hello --
I'm brand new to Gallery, and I'm trying to figure out how to
configure it to meet a special need. I'd like a way for wedding
guests to contribute their photos to a common album. About 10
different people will each contribute 10-100 shots each to the album.
Permissions can be simple, as I'm willing to trust each of these
contributors not to mess with things.
My goal is to make things simple for these contributors: a streamlined
process to add upload images from their hard drive, the ability to
rotate these images if necessary, and the ability to quickly edit the
title and description. And ideally, nothing else should be allowed or
visible. I'd like to be able to tag the photos (primarily by who is
in them) but the search function seems to work so well that I presume
I can do this by just putting the keywords in the description.
It seems like the best way to do this would be to have a single user
('wedding') and email the password to the contributors. If I have
every contributor register and create a sub-album, I don't see that
I'd have any way of preventing anyone who stumbles across the site
from registering and using it to host their own stuff. This way, in
theory only those to whom I mail the password have upload access.
I'm thinking that the best approach would be for me grant this single
user permission to 'add-subitem' (but not 'edit item'), modify the
gallery and photo templates to add an 'edit' link for items created by
that user, and then write a mini-module with some forms that would let
a user edit the title and description of (as well as rotate) those
images that they own. Or would there be some better way to do this?
Reading through the forums, it seemed like there were several ways to
do this sort of customization. The 'all-in-one-directory' approach appealed to me the most,
but I wasn't sure which version this worked with. I'm using
gallery-2.0-rc-1, but can switch to anything else (including CVS) if
necessary. Presuming I take the approach above, what would be the best way of making a modification like this that touches a couple templates and adds a new module?
By the way, the install was wonderfully easy --- thanks to whoever put
so much effort into making it that way.
Thanks!
--nate
Posted: Tue, 2005-08-16 21:19
Posts: 9
Adding one user and giving the contributors the same user/password is probably the easiest way to go about doing this. If you have each user register, you could give them permission to do their necessary things once they've registered and then take them away later so they can't host their own stuff, which seems to be your main concern.
Why not let them have the edit item ability (which includes the rotation of images) ?
Posts: 12
Thanks for the response. My concern about having each one register is not that I'm worried that the people who are contributing wedding photos could also host their own things, but that once I open the registration, anyone who sees the site could register and start adding their own things. I'd rather keep it to a set group of people, but without the hassle of trying to pre-assign independent usernames and passwords for each member of that group.
> Why not let them have the edit item ability (which includes the rotation of images) ?
That was the way I was trying first, but doing that seemed like it added a lot of confusing options. First, there seemed to be no way to let the contributors edit the sub-items without giving them full ability to edit the entire gallery (Edit Album, Rearrange Items, Reorder Items). While I'm not that worried about them doing this maliciously, it seemed unnecessarily confusing for them. I found that disussed in this thread, which suggests using sub-albums instead, but this also presents the contributor with a lot of confusing options.
Second, even if I do this the contributor has to wade through a number of tabs to get to the options I want them to use. First one clicks on 'Edit Photo', and it launches a Java app to let you crop the thumbnail (not the default action I would have chosen). To change the description, one stumbles onto the 'General' tab, which lets you modify the description as well as a number of other things I'd rather they not mess with (for example, the size of the thumbnail). While this degree of complexity is probably fine for a full gallery, I'm hoping to come up with something a little faster and clearer for my lightweight use.
So I'm still thinking the mini-module and template changes are the way to go, but I'm not sure how to do that cleanly. I'll start on it, though, and and see how it goes. Suggestions still appreciated, though.
Posts: 16504
Too many words and I'm too tired ;)
If I get the jist of what you're looking for. There are 2 options I'd look at using.
1) Create a group. Then create user accounts for these 10 or so people. Add them all to that group. Then assign that group permission to add to that album. (the power of groups, anyone who goes off assiging permissions on a user level basis is just asking for an administrative nightmare under any type of system)
2) Take a look at the Album Password module. I haven't used it so I don't know if it would fit for this purpose.