goals/diary of a noob

No worries whatsoever. It just makes it easier and faster to get support/offer insight since there’s a relatively high volume of posting on this board. Thanks for actually taking the time to share your experience.

well if anyone can follow this..... maybe it will help!! it is certainly helping me to be able to write out my thoughts, keeps me on track and focused. anyhow, ...added the tags to my posts.

am changing the xml structure currently which means changing my actionscript so I have to do that and test it and then will make my TVs and finish my chunk. and then hopefully I’ll be able to test and....voila, will have an easily editable flash slideshow.

If you use the MaxiGallery snippet, it has a Smooth Gallery mode that can do the same thing that a flash rotator can do and it has a simple management interface that handles uploading and resizing pictures and all.

If you are pretty good with PHP, I would recommend taking a look at some snippet code to see how to connect to the database, how to use chunks a templates, etc. You can access the database easily from a snippet (to create your own tables, run queries, etc). Maybe take a look at assets/snippets/weblogin/websignup.inc.php for ideas of how to code your own snippets. It wouldn’t be to difficult to keep all the data for your images in a table and use one snippet to manage entries, and another snippet to output an xml file from the data in the table.

thanks r!!

since i already have the Flash file built ...and it’s more of a promo piece with music and text than an image gallery... I’m going to keep heading the direction I am going in currently, sort out how use ditto to accomplish this task (this is as much about me learning to use the tools as it is about building this one site and I need to understand this fully)... but I will look at the MaxGallery, it might be more flexible than I think...for use on future projects.

thank you VERY much for the idea of looking at the snippet source. to understand how it works. Just from installing snippets it looks to me like we input the snippets into the modx interface and then also store the files in "assets/snippets/foo" and that is just a backup? or is the file in "assets/snippets/whatever" actually used?

Most snippets just have some human readable comments and some initialization code in the interface, and then they include a file with the code in the assets/snippets/whatever directory. You can put all of your code in the manager interface if you would like--it is a matter of preference.

Two things about snippet code.

One, Firefox has a plug-in called "It’s All Text" that lets you edit any textarea in your preferred text editor.

Two. All the code in the Manager form field is stored in the database, but it is also cached in the siteCache.idx.php file, so the more code you break out into included external .php files in the assets/snippets/mysnippet/ directory the better, to keep those lines and lines of code out of the site cache file.

thank you susan, very very helpful to know. I’m going to figure out how to make a snippet next.

My flash xml backend piece is mostly done now.

turns out I didn’t need Ditto at all. Ditto apparently would be excellent if I had multiple Flash pages but I do not. The example article I was looking at did have multiple Flash pages which is why they had the id parameter... so I simply made TVs for all of my images, their captions and positions, then loaded those into my xml template and voila!! it works.

my only issue with it right now is that the preview thumbnail is not loading? am going to try chmod’ing to 777 and see if they load after that.

my code for the content area of the xml page I made ended up looking like this:


so I am wondering if there was a better way to do this where the admin page is not so long and this is not in the content? because really they only need to access the TV fields, I do not even want my admin people to see this code but as it is in the main content box, don’t know that I can hide it.(??) Also really need for them to preview the photos. I did change the permissions but there is still no thumbnail, wondering if it is due to the size of the images?

had to code the actionscript in my flash file to look for index.php?id=15 instead of the images.xml file I did have in there, also redid the actionscript to rename the fields so I could have a dropdown right or left in the admin

but overall, pleased with myself, I even installed and used the swffix snippet.

have resolved the TV image preview issue, apparently if there is a symbol in the TV name then the preview does not work. I changed the TV names and took out the underscore and it is now working perfectly. excellent. Plan to post screen shots of the finished admin piece when I install my managermanager or whichever thing I use.

Quote from: redtoad at Aug 13, 2009, 08:06 PM

have resolved the TV image preview issue, apparently if there is a symbol in the TV name then the preview does not work. I changed the TV names and took out the underscore and it is now working perfectly. excellent. Plan to post screen shots of the finished admin piece when I install my managermanager or whichever thing I use.

The Evo 1.0.0 release will work with any TV name, although special characters (and definitely spaces) might cause problems elsewhere. I think as soon as you get a bit more familiar with the 096x branch you’ll find Evo a breeze and much more usable. The terminology is slightly different and the colors are tweaked, but it’s basically the same at the core.

hoping to finish this project up this weekend and then I have another immediately following that I need to go from psd to modx... want to track how long it takes me.... I’m thinking I might try Evo then. Or maybe just do one more at this build to make sure I am clear on everything and then do the next one, I have several. Thank you for the suggestion.

okay so last night’s adventures was first to play with/evaluate/compare and contrast Quick Manager, QuickEdit, ManagerManager and HideManagerFields which seem to be my main choices when it comes to customizing muggle interfaces.

findings:

QuickEdit, while a good tool, concerned me initially because I did not see a way to turn off the fields that can potentially break the site if my muggles get hold of them. Even after I put in the HideManager fields snippet and test-configured it... it seemed to be showing all that I had hidden still. HideManager doesn’t work with QE. Of course. Disabling it and turning to Quick Manager, I really enjoyed the interface...which is a thickbox ...modal window type thing (someone iframed the main admin window and hid the doc tree, so basically you have the main edit box showing for each document in the interface, simplifying it mucho). However the edit box was not compatible with my Flash intro (intro bleeds through) and then I couldn’t get rid of it. It would not close. I had to refresh it to close it. My navigation was under it so I had to navigate using the "id" in the browser. Lots hidden... but no document tree meant I couldn’t direct my muggles to their xml page to edit the Flash fields. I could assign those TVs to the home page to get around that...but that makes that page’s admin form -huge- and intimidating. That is 45 form fields on its own.

um... no.

I think with time and a bit of tweaking I could probably overcome any and all issues with QM... I jacked with it a bit, messed with the thickbox styles, etc....however the "no document tree" thing was the deal breaker, as it meant only accessing pages that are visible in the menu and all mine are not. I’m not hacking it to change that, too much work...lol.

so I went back to QE. I did find the global settings for content but I admit to doing a quick and dirty hack to the if-then statement in the configuration (I think?) to show only content ...will probably fix it and do it "right" today .. I just wanted to see what it would do.

ManagerManager looks really good but I need to sit with a notepad, go through the interface and record each item I want changed. I really need to design the admin UI, I feel like if I do this once it will be a snap then to plug in universally. It’s just the first time is a killer.

the HideManagerFields script is a good and more lightweight solution, much easier to wrap my head around, not so scary and big, again not exactly plug and play but manageable. ...defaults are okay, easily edited though for a more quick turnaround and it looks like it works with the ManagerManager which is helpful but I’m sort of wondering why bother with both? but it looks like it changes the interface according to template and I love that, don’t know yet if MM does that but I’m guessing no hence the new script to work with it.


all right, the last thing I tried last night was the Module Creator...

and here is the thing, the developer basically built an add/edit/delete little widget. Groovy. However he did it by first making his own database app (oddly enough called dbapp) and then when he was done, he tried to make it generic so anyone could use it. Fantastic.

-problem is- if you have different form fields in your table, which I do... then it breaks. Because he kinda missed a few queries.

so. I got the module installed, made my own module using his scripts, got the screens to come up by rewriting a few of his queries, but it was error after error and I really need to go through it myself with a fine toothed comb when I’m not tired, read the logic and rewrite it for myself. A good start though, gave me a boost and saved me some time definitely. Since I already have my little add/edit/delete app built in php, it shouldn’t take me too darn long to figure out how to tweak what is there and get this working.