Re: PHP/MySQL tasks on the art.ubuntu.com website

[Ali Davoodifar <davoodifar gmail com>]

I think automatically generating thumbnails is not a very good idea
for a couple of reasons:

- It puts unnecessary load on the server for little gain while for an
artist who has made the original artwork it's a trivial task to make
the thumbnail as well.

- It takes the control away from the artist in creating the thumbnail
as he sees fit. This is a very important point, as I'm of the opinion
that a well designed and functioning thumbnail is one that is not made
out of only "resizing" the original but also "cropping". A cropped up
thumbnail usually has much more visual interest and is much more clear
and inviting. IMO, resizing alone is a very poor way to make a
thumbnail.

Personally, if I were to place myself in the user's shoes, I would not
be too  thrilled to see the site automatically generate a poor quality
thumbnail for me which I have no say in.

So, in short I think it's too much trouble to go through to implement
a feature which at the end is actually quite flawed in design.

IMHO, of course.

-Ali Davoodifar

On 9/6/05, Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> You guys expressed an interest is doing some PHP/MySQL work on the new
> art website. Over the past week I've dug into it a bit and taught myself
> some basic PHP just to get it up and running, though this is not a
> viable approach for the long term (ie. I don't really have the PHP
> skills ATM to write good code). After launching the site, a few issues
> have cropped up that could use some work. I'll list them here and post
> them on the wiki:
> 
> * Code comments and cleanup: there are very few comments in the code. It
> might be a good exercise for someone to go through and add sensible
> comments and perhaps even clean up the code in various ways if they have
> the experience to do that. I already abstracted out some hard-coded
> things like site name, contact email etc., from the original gnome
> in-line versions to variables in the config file, but more of this could
> be done.
> 
> * Direct upload: The way we are currently uploading images is awful! the
> gnome version had some server-specific stuff that I couldn't get working
> and had to work around. Their version was less than super-convenient,
> but ours is directly dreadful. It's quite easy for artists/users to
> submit artwork, but it's then a very laborious process for the admins to
> upload it and link to the right place. Getting it to work they way the
> original does would help, but making a solution where the original
> submitter uploads artwork and thumbnails directly would be much better
> (into a holding area for evaluation). It would be good if you didn't
> have to tick the box next to the URL field but that the application
> detected that there was text in it and also what extension was used.
> 
> * Automatically generated thumbnails (on upload). From backgrounds,
> screenshots, etc. we could get automatically generated 96x72px
> thumbnails with Imagemagik or GD, saving the uploader from making them.
> 
> * Enhanced ranking system for better filtering: We will be using this
> site for both WIP art and as a repository for end users, who might
> prefer not to wade through tons of unfinished stuff with comments.
> Perhaps we could add a flag to each entry denoting whether it's
> production quality (this would apply more to themes and icon sets that
> can be broken or incomplete) or just a default browse mode at 1 star
> (currently 0) that can be changed by the user. Themes and iconsets might
> also be associated with one or more releases (known to work with 5.10, etc.)
> 
> I'm CCing the gnome art list on this too so we can coordinate
> developments. It would be great if we could manage to keep the source in
> the same tree so we can all benefit from future improvements.
> 
> - Henrik
>