Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

13 posts by 7 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: April 25, 2012   (RSS)

Re: [mel] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Chris - July 19, 2010

Hi Mel,

We have an Watermarking Plugin in development which could save you all your Paintshop Pro work -- it can be configured to automatically add an image to a corner of uploaded images. Uploading the same image to each of your sites would result in separately watermarked images if you set it up properly. :)

I'll check to see what our plans are for this plugin.

That's the only simple solution I can think of, everything else gets much more complicated.

You could run multiple sites off the same CMS Builder (but you'd need one license for each site.) The trick here would be in figuring out how to store the information so that you can have some things the same across your sites while other things are different.

The simplest approach might be to keep your Products section, but add Keywords fields for each of your sites (i.e. Keywords Site 1, Keywords Site 2, Keywords Site 3, etc.) If every product isn't to display on every site, you could either have checkboxes for whether or not they show up OR take an empty keywords field to mean that the product shouldn't show up on that site.

Search engines wouldn't know whether you were serving all your sites from the same database or not. They only see the content.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.
All the best,
Chris

Re: [chris] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Mel - July 19, 2010 - edited: July 19, 2010

Hi Mel,

We have an Watermarking Plugin in development which could save you all your Paintshop Pro work -- it can be configured to automatically add an image to a corner of uploaded images. Uploading the same image to each of your sites would result in separately watermarked images if you set it up properly. :)

I'll check to see what our plans are for this plugin.



That's the only simple solution I can think of, everything else gets much more complicated.

You could run multiple sites off the same CMS Builder (but you'd need one license for each site.) The trick here would be in figuring out how to store the information so that you can have some things the same across your sites while other things are different.

The simplest approach might be to keep your Products section, but add Keywords fields for each of your sites (i.e. Keywords Site 1, Keywords Site 2, Keywords Site 3, etc.) If every product isn't to display on every site, you could either have checkboxes for whether or not they show up OR take an empty keywords field to mean that the product shouldn't show up on that site.

Search engines wouldn't know whether you were serving all your sites from the same database or not. They only see the content.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.


Hi Chris thanks for the reply, plenty of food for thought here

So you could have multiple sites accessing the same CMS Builder which could in fact be a domain soley used for storing the information? or I suppose it could be one of the actual sites

No problem in paying to license each site (that is only fair), but would CMS need to be installed on each site to access the master database?

I am guessing here but I assume that the full pathway to the master site would need to be used rather than just

<?php
require_once

"/home/mels/public_html/cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php";

?>

How would this require statement be written to access the Master CMS Builder

All sites have individual domains but are hosted on a dedicated server under my control

Perhaps some sort of config file could be set up for each domain to call in the requires and css styles etc

Take your point about search engines regarding just seeing content

If the multiple sites were pulling record details from a master CMS Builder how would I get the images to match with the individual records if they were not on the Master CMS Builder database

Because:

If you were uploading images to each site and then getting the plugin to watermark the images how would you tie in the images with a specific product?

I can grasp the theory behind mutiple sites being fed by a master CMS Builder which will need some planning and thought when setting up the fields, but cant see how the images would tie in with individual records if they were being uploaded to the individual sites

Thanks Mel

Re: [mel] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Chris - July 19, 2010

Hi Mel,

No, you wouldn't want to install CMS Builder on each of the sites.

If all your sites are on the same server and share the same directory structure, you could run a single copy of CMS Builder from one location and have the other sites all require_once the same viewer_functions.php from their other domain directories. You'd need to decide where you want to run the single copy of CMS Builder from: it could either be in one of the sites or on a separate domain if you wanted.

Regarding the watermarked images, if you want to run this all off one CMS Builder, I guess you'd need a custom solution: you could dynamically watermark images on the way out of the system and add some caching to avoid wasted work. Please let me know if you're interested in having something like this built for you through our consulting department and I can write you up a quote.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.
All the best,
Chris

Re: [chris] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Codee - July 20, 2010

We have an Watermarking Plugin in development which could save you all your Paintshop Pro work -- it can be configured to automatically add an image to a corner of uploaded images. Uploading the same image to each of your sites would result in separately watermarked images if you set it up properly. :)


Where are you at on this watermarking plugin. I have a client that could use it NOW as we will have to go through the struggle written about, so it would be a terrific addon immediately. Is it going to appear as a check box feature,kind of like title, caption, etc. - so it could be turned on/off for any upload field?

Re: [equinox69] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Chris - July 20, 2010

Hi equinox69,

Well, it's still in development, but it does work and could be very useful. It can be turned on and off for different upload fields, and is currently configurable via a list of "rules" written into the plugin code. They look like this:

// You can add multiple watermarking rules to apply different images to different upload fields. Only the first rule which matches a field will be applied.

watermark_addRule(array(
'tables' => '', # Comma-separated list of table names to be watermarked. To apply this rule to all tables, leave blank or comment out this line.
'fields' => '', # Comma-separated list of upload field names to be watermarked. To apply this rule to all upload fields, leave blank or comment out this line.
'image' => 'images/logo.png', # url or filepath to watermarking image
'alpha' => 1, # Translucency: 1 = opaque, 0.5 = half-transparent
'hAlign' => 'right', # Horizontal Alignment: left, center, right
'vAlign' => 'bottom', # Vertical Alignment: top, middle, bottom
'hMargin' => 5, # Horizontal Margin: pixels left between left/right edge of image and watermark (n/a when hAlign=center)
'vMargin' => 5, # Vertical Margin: pixels left between top/bottom edge of image and watermark (n/a when vAlign=middle)
));


As it stands, I believe watermarks are applied to the original-size image, which means that thumbnails can get differently sized watermarks. This is something we're still sorting out.

We certainly can't provide any support for this plugin until we've properly released it, but if you're eager to purchase it ahead of time, send me a PM or email and I'll see what I can wrangle.
All the best,
Chris

Re: [chris] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Mel - July 21, 2010

Hi Mel,

No, you wouldn't want to install CMS Builder on each of the sites.

If all your sites are on the same server and share the same directory structure, you could run a single copy of CMS Builder from one location and have the other sites all require_once the same viewer_functions.php from their other domain directories. You'd need to decide where you want to run the single copy of CMS Builder from: it could either be in one of the sites or on a separate domain if you wanted.

Regarding the watermarked images, if you want to run this all off one CMS Builder, I guess you'd need a custom solution: you could dynamically watermark images on the way out of the system and add some caching to avoid wasted work. Please let me know if you're interested in having something like this built for you through our consulting department and I can write you up a quote.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any questions.


Hi Chris,

Yes would be interested in a quote for dynamically watermarking the images

Could this be done by combining a png image with the incoming image or outgoing image from the master site

What I would need the custom solution to do is

1. Allow me to specify the position of the watermark on the images

2. Be able to use different watermarks for the different domains and be able to amend the design of these when I needed to, hence my question about png image

In order to implement all of this I need to be sure that I can get the master site to interact with the other sites ,below is the require_once code that I am using on of of the pages on lets say the master site. What do I need to add to this to get another site to to view the information, in other words what needs to go in front of /home/esc110/etc/etc

<?php
require_once "/home/esc110/public_html/cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php";

list($biosRecords, $biosDetails) = getRecords(array(
'tableName' => 'bios',
'perPage' => '10',

'orderBy' => 'view_order',

));

?>


Both the master site and test second site have CMS Builder licenses

Mel

Re: [mel] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Chris - July 22, 2010

Hi Mel,

You're definitely going to want to make sure you can get this working before you commission any custom software. :)

I noticed above that you had a different filepath: /home/mels/public_html/cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php

Assuming that "mels" is your master site, you'd want all your other sites to use the filepath to the "mels" CMSB too. Try that out and make sure it works.

I'll send you the quote via email.
All the best,
Chris

Re: [chris] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Joseph - January 10, 2011

Hi Chris
are there any updates on the watermarking plug in?
Joseph

Re: [socanews] Comments & Suggestions Wanted Please

By Damon - January 13, 2011

Hi Joseph,

Chris has been away this week.

No update on the watermark plugin. We will post in the forum and the newsletter any updates. No time line for that right now.

Other plugins that have been released in the last few of months:
Outgoing SMS
GeCoder
and a number of other User Submitted plugins.
Cheers,
Damon Edis - interactivetools.com

Hire me! Save time by getting our experts to help with your project.
http://www.interactivetools.com/consulting/