General support topic for Aeva Media (Latest release: July 28, 2010)

[Nao 尚]

Holy crap, I'm completely stuck...

I need some perspective from outside viewers here.

Can you tell me in WHICH exact situations you would like to see the UNSEEN counter be decreased when an item is shown?
List, please. And list of situations where it shouldn't be decreased.

I'm having much trouble with the item comments, for instance... If one views an item via a smg tag, should it be marked as seen if said item has comments in its item page?! Crap like that...

Should I simply separate Unseen items from Unread comments? That could be doable I guess...

[Filipina]

I have seen enough reviews and visited your demo site. I am sold. I am not running any converters and going to install a fresh Beta version ASAP.

1)  Should I do it now or are you on the verge of one more update?

2) I searched "theme" in this thread and found very little one question on this subject. I have an extra "Royal Curve" theme which seems to be just fine with Simple Portal. Themes usually ok with this MOD?

3) And lastly. In my old SMF Gallery I can tell which pics belong to which members because their User ID is part of the image name. So I know who they go with. Can I upload images myself and then reassign them to the owner, like a "bulk reassignment"?

Thanks and Peace Out! 

[Nao 尚]

I have seen enough reviews and visited your demo site. I am sold. I am not running any converters and going to install a fresh Beta version ASAP.

You can still convert afterwards.
And you can't be sold on something that's free!

1)  Should I do it now or are you on the verge of one more update?

Hmm I was planning to release beta 4 tonight but then there was Alien on TV so I made a choice... Now that it's postponed to tomorrow, I may be implementing the unseen counter changes before I release it, I don't know. You can download the latest SVN instead if you want, you don't need to wait for official releases. (smf-media.com, just remember the unzip & re-zip the package by yourself, otherwise it'll crash at install time.)

2) I searched "theme" in this thread and found very little one question on this subject. I have an extra "Royal Curve" theme which seems to be just fine with Simple Portal. Themes usually ok with this MOD?

On SMF2, yes. It's optimized for Curve, though, like on my site. I know it doesn't look that good on SMF1 but I don't know if it's worth spending time to fix it. I do fix the biggest mistakes.

3) And lastly. In my old SMF Gallery I can tell which pics belong to which members because their User ID is part of the image name. So I know who they go with. Can I upload images myself and then reassign them to the owner, like a "bulk reassignment"?

Hmm, you can reassign album owners, not picture owners. Only with phpMyAdmin can you reassign item owners (change id_member in the media table). But what's the point?

[IdanC]

know the feeling... so many decisions, so many lives it will impact 

i'll start by expressing my most sincere admiration for this beautiful baby of yours, aka aeva media.

here are my thought on the issues -

we have three types of ways to view an item - normal, hs, and smgtag. on the other hand we have three counters - item's views, user's unseen items, and user's unseen comments.

the only simple way to combine them and still keep them all is to decide a view is a view is a view, and they all have the same affect on all the different counters.

i can think of a more elegant way to combine them, but it sound like quite allot of coding to do -



maybe adding the item's description to the hs view will truly justify the count change. obviously the unseen comments is problematic, but i think its an esoteric feature, and maybe it should be excused for the sake of the other features.

hope i didn't missed my chance, and if i may offer my help in anyway - feel free.

[Nao 尚]

I'll try to think of the problem tomorrow. It's really a big deal. I hope I won't have to make a separate unseen comments field+table, really. But it seems unlikely.
Damn, I don't even use comments myself...!

[lilbabydino]

Looks like a really nice mod. Sorry if this has already been posted, but I had a thought.

I see that users can post YouTube videos to their galleries. Is there a way of automatically adding any YouTube video that a user posts on the forum itself (using the auto-embed feature) to their gallery? So what I mean is, when they post a YouTube link, it gets converted and added to a default album such as 'YouTube Videos'.

I understand if this is not possible due to being too complicated, but I thought I'd ask anyway

[IdanC]

i think that what would make it easier to decide, is to make the hs view more like the normal view.

if you include the item's description, you're almost there... i think comments in hs view should be no more than a link (something like "click here the read 3 comments about the item...") that opens the item in normal view (with anchor to the comments' section).

on the other hand, limit the hs view to images only. unless of course you can put the video or audio player in the hs window, but i guess that's just too far fetched...

good luck, may the force guide you in your quest for answers!

[lc62003]

The mod simply embeds a video within a post when the link is posted.  It doesn't put the vid in the gallery.  You can upload your own vids to the gallery.  Does that help?   

[Filipina]

Thanks Nao. I knew after I said "I'm sold" you would get me on that one LOL

I guess I will wait until official release here because I get annoyed before and delete my membership at smfmedia. No big deal I am having problems with bugs in the new SMF 2.0 RC2 custom profile fields anyway, which I am trying to fix so I can wait for your release here.

Grest news about the themes.

Oh the reason I ask about the last thing. Sometimes I help members that are having trouble uploading pics, and once I upload I just change ownership to them with SMF Gallery. I was just thinking if it works the same way with this MOD I could upload some and reassign them when I have free time.

Ok enjoy Alien

[lilbabydino]

The mod simply embeds a video within a post when the link is posted.  It doesn't put the vid in the gallery.  You can upload your own vids to the gallery.  Does that help?   

Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a way to do that, since it seems like that would be a nice way of viewing all the YT videos that had been posted on the forum (through galleries).

[Puffin-10]

 . . . read them all. Actually saw your "Mouse over" note against "Moderate Own Albums"! . Had the forum for 3 years. It's only with the new Gallery I seem to have this problem.

[Nao 尚]

Okay then you'll have to post a screenshot of your permissions section...

[Nao 尚]

Looks like a really nice mod. Sorry if this has already been posted, but I had a thought.

I see that users can post YouTube videos to their galleries. Is there a way of automatically adding any YouTube video that a user posts on the forum itself (using the auto-embed feature) to their gallery?

No. This was at some point in my to-do-list but I pretty much gave up on this, as there seemed to be no interest from the audience. (And I really, really have to choose my priorities.)

So what I mean is, when they post a YouTube link, it gets converted and added to a default album such as 'YouTube Videos'.

The easiest way to do it is with the Foxy! add-on. You simply click the SMG BBC button when you're writing a post, and you enter your video link in the new window. You submit, and it's automatically posted to the gallery and posted in your message as well.

[Nao 尚]

I guess I will wait until official release here because I get annoyed before and delete my membership at smfmedia. No big deal

I remember you tried SMG a long time ago. I don't remember what your issue was, though.
All I know is that Aeva Media has nothing to do with SMG 1.5 in terms of features and bugs. A whole new world of features -- and a whole new world of bugs. 

Oh the reason I ask about the last thing. Sometimes I help members that are having trouble uploading pics, and once I upload I just change ownership to them with SMF Gallery. I was just thinking if it works the same way with this MOD I could upload some and reassign them when I have free time.

Not really. They shouldn't have trouble uploading pics anyway ().

Ok enjoy Alien

Oh, I came here became I got bored halfway through... When the little guy came out of John Hurt's stomach, I decided it was PC time.

[Nao 尚]

i think that what would make it easier to decide, is to make the hs view more like the normal view.

if you include the item's description, you're almost there...

Don't forget that a long description would still have to be loaded in your page. So, if you're on an album page where all items have very long descriptions, it could take a while to load the page. (Not that much I guess, but...)
Also, with a long comment, the picture doesn't get much screen space. Imagine the picture is very narrow and very tall. The description will be resized to the same width, making for a very tall description too. Meaning the picture will be pretty much... Small. Things like that.

on the other hand, limit the hs view to images only. unless of course you can put the video or audio player in the hs window, but i guess that's just too far fetched...

I can perfectly do it. Actually, I already do it for embedded videos... Just not for JWPlayer stuff for now -- but it can be done easy enough. I just need to load the JWPlayer script inside the page, which is what has been withholding me so far. (I'm trying not to clutter the source code with external stuff when not needed.)

[IdanC]

you're a usability genius.

so no desc in hs. i'm trying to think of a way to let the user know there's more content than what he sees in the hs view, but if i'm honest about it, once the user got the pic/video/audio, he's satisfied.

so basically the problem is that a too nicely done hs view, would extinct the normal view, and consequently the description and comments features. same applies to all types of media if you get your way with the jwplayer...

that's quite a pickle...

[Nao 尚]

you're a usability genius.

I actually wasted a year of my life on my puzzle game to make the interface look good (it was Windows Vista style before Windows Vista was out, sort of, with dialog boxes showing up with a transparent fade-in and growing in size, etc, and still behaving like normal dialog boxes...)

So it's no surprise I constantly try to rethink the UI here. Although I'm still a long way from there.
Basically, I started galleries by using Coppermine, which had a crappy UI. Because of my inability to post comments on items even though permission was given (!), I later switched to Gallery2 which I hated (too bloated, too complicated), then SMF Gallery which I disliked, then to SMF Gallery Pro which I liked a bit better, but guess what? I thought the UI was ugly, and didn't like how the code didn't follow PHP and SMF standards. Then I found out about SMG (which Dragooon tended to shorten to "SMFMGal" at the time, lol), found its nickname (Buffy fans around?), loved how Dragooon had programmed it, so I joined the team and didn't need more than a few days of work to clean it up and bring it to actual SMF standards. The UI was also the best of all I had tested so far, so I didn't really take it into consideration. Then, weeks later, I started reworking it a bit to my taste. It stayed like that for months until Dragooon dropped the ball. Then after some time I realized I had full control over the software, so I might as well make it look like what I wanted in the first place, back when I was using Coppermine crap...

Problem is, there are SO MANY things left to do in every area of Aeva Media, that you can barely see the surface of what I would like it to become. Really, it'll probably only be in AM 2.0.
I still hope to be able to implement the user control panel in 1.0, but for now, it's a long shot.

Now to my little secret. I've had to make so many compromises internally with the different types of files and ways of using the software, that SMG/AM is really filled with small patches here and there. I defy anyone to read through some of the pivotal functions like the SMG tag functions or aeva_listItems(), and tell me they understand why I'm doing this and that here and there, at any place in the functions. I constantly have to fix support for one thing, risking to break another. It's something that is very tiresome, and really, sometimes I feel like I'm reaching my own limits. This is the case for the Unseen area. Originally it wasn't very practical, so I added an Unseen counter in the Media tab, which itself added more trouble... And the more I fixed issues, the more they would pop up. Now basically it's working okay, and I'm happy with it, but what you're asking of me, while pretty logical, is likely to make me fall down into another spiral of endless bug fixes. If not bug fixes, it would be performance fixes, because I don't see how I can deal with Unseen counters without making a SQL query for each and every item... Ouch.

Thing is, I can not focus only on small galleries. I need to think ahead and consider performance trades I have to make for Aeva Media to work on huge sites and galleries with millions of items. I can't honestly ask the server owner to "buy more Ram and a better CPU" while I could simply have made sure the database was correctly optimised... I mean, I'm not Microsoft you see? Thinking ahead is primordial. Even when you work alone on free software, which basically should free me of any pressure, lol.

so no desc in hs. i'm trying to think of a way to let the user know there's more content than what he sees in the hs view, but if i'm honest about it, once the user got the pic/video/audio, he's satisfied.

Yes, it's a problem I know...
Yesterday I was thinking of getting the number of comments in an item and posting it in the "More details" link. As for the description, I could simply limit it to something like 200 characters, and if there's more, add a "More..." link (basically the same as the More details link.) That would simplify it -- but make it slower, because every time I cut a string like that, my complex routine that takes care of everything will slow it down by making sure the string looks good and is xHTML valid. Another nightmare...

so basically the problem is that a too nicely done hs view, would extinct the normal view, and consequently the description and comments features. same applies to all types of media if you get your way with the jwplayer...

I'm torn about the item pages. I mean, they can be considered as permalinks, see? But the user honestly doesn't spend time looking for everything in the page: Exif data, upload date, shoot date, filesize, file dimensions, video duration, things like that... I don't really see a reason to put these into the HS view. But it's still good to have them around. Hence, "More details", rather than something like "Full view".

[Filipina]

Ok thanks Nao.. actually I never installed SMG. I think we exchanged IM's about it a long time ago but I never tried it

[Nao 尚]

Horrible, horrible mess really...

I was very happy I found a cool workaround with all the unseen stuff.

Basically, when loading a preview or fullsize file, I simply make sure to check its unseen status, right at the same time as I'm loading its filename and user permissions.

But then there's this problem: it slows down ALL item loads, including items that have already been marked as seen... It doesn't slow them down by more than a few milliseconds, but it still will.


Is this an acceptable workaround??!!
I still don't know.

[Nao 尚]

Oh, okay