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



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



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