Maybe we need a new section in the forum

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muadib
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Re: Maybe we need a new section in the forum

Post by muadib »

Iarla wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2020 1:23 pm That could work. I think personally the objects should be submitted to aminet and the post here should have a thumbnail with the link.

If the BBS software supports thumbnails for posts (just in the objects section) it would make navigation very quick. Otherwise, I could put together a gallery from the posts here as they are made.
That's great, I have a couple of projects uploaded on Aminet that could qualify. Projects meaning that there are objects, images and scene files inside.

Question is, then, how we should organize the subforums...

We could have a 'Repository' subforum and inside it have 'Full Projects', 'Scenes', 'Objects' etc.
Would that make sense?
- muadib
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Iarla
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Re: Maybe we need a new section in the forum

Post by Iarla »

That sounds realistic to me.

For search, tags are more helpful than categories (in my opinion). But I don't think any of us have time to develop a web based submission system that supports tags and has a database at the moment :shock:

So yes, I think categories for now :)
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Iarla
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Re: Maybe we need a new section in the forum

Post by Iarla »

A plugin was developed for this purpose, but abandoned since and not maintained. A pity.

I'll make a gallery page that displays submitted images of rendered objects. A download link for the object/scene at aminet will be included.

Members of this forum could have access to a separate page where submissions can be made which will update the gallery.
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Iarla
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Re: Maybe we need a new section in the forum

Post by Iarla »

Here's what I'm thinking: https://www.amigaraytracers.com/gallery/gallery.php

This is implemented with a simple sqlite database table. Submit button is disabled (because submission doesn't work yet). Thumbnail images need only be 20Kb and a full screengrab is < 100Kb. We could have clickable images to see fullsize this way, but I don't think it's necessary and we'd save space by not storing the fullsize images.

Just need to decide permissions: should any forum member be able to submit to the gallery? Or should it be just admins and members put requests in the forum? Personally, I think the first one - the more automated the better since most of us have busy lives and don't have much time.

Another question is the use of Javascript. Javascript can do input validation and scale down images if necessary but Amiga browsers have weak JS support so they would be excluded by this. I'm sure PHP can do this processing too though - the page could just refresh with the result.

Last thing would be pagination - I don't know how to do that. Oh, tags would be good too but that can come later if there is time. Also it's not mobile friendly yet, but that's not hard to add to the CSS.

Thoughts?
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