New website – check it out!

Check out my portfolio website –http://www.veronikalesnakova.co.uk/

If you like what you see and you have a project in mind then I’m happy to hear from you.

Decision to change the project into concept only

The decision to change the project from built one to concept only project was made. This is because of time constrains and because of the overall size of the project would be too much for one person to complete alone.

Making slideshow dynamic in CouchCMS

Last thing that needed to be dynamic on the website was the main slideshow on index page.

Research how to make it dynamic

Research was done on how to make slideshow dynamic, reading post of CouchCMS forum about the same problem and trying to implement recommended code in but nothing seemed to be working right.

Posting the problem on CouchCMS forum/reply

Decision to get help was made and the problem was posted on CouchCMS forum with code that was used.

Reply was –

Adding recommended code into the website

After uploading file to the server and uploading a new picture in CouchCMS admin, slideshow was all dynamic!

Adding new rows allows user to add as many pictures to the slideshow as required.

Result –

Joining community of practice and asking for help

Even thought CouchCMS is quite new content management system, it has own community of practice – group of people with the same interest sharing knowledge between each other.

http://www.couchcms.com/forum/

Only registered users can post posts and reply. Registration is needed which is simple and straight forward.

Post about thumbnails problem

This is post that has been posted about thumbnails problem –

This is the reply –

The reply was well explained and refereed to further reading regarding to the problem. It was helpful and made good sense.
The code was added to already existing code in ‘gallery.php’, uploaded to the server and it was all working!

Result on the website –

Result on CouchCMS admin page –

Editing thumbnails

Choose where thumbnails needs to be cropped from and click ‘Recreate’. Ability to view recreated thumbnail is possible if needed and then click ‘Save’. Refresh the page and that is it.

Further investigation of thumbnails/community of practice

Further investigation was needed to find out how to change the path to the right thumbnails after editing.

This was done by reading forum posts talking about the same problem from CouchCMS forum and trying to add recommended lines of code to my code. IT WAS NOT WORKING!

Emailing CouchCMS support

Next step was to email CouchCMS support and ask about differences between free and paid version of CouchCMS. This was because there could be a chance that free version was limited to do only certain things and upgrading to paid version of CouchCMS was needed to be able to control thumbnails.

The reply was:

“There is *absolutely no* difference between the two – in fact we don’t even have two versions. There is only one that you download – the free version. The free license requires that you must have a footer attribution link. If one later decides to buy a commercial license, just a setting of couch/config.php needs to be changed to remove the footer link. No other change is required.

 As for the gallery problem, may I request you to please post the problem (along with a few screenshots of what the thumbnails look like and how you’d want them to be) on our forums?”

With this in mind,  joining community of practice of CouchCMS was the next step.

Editing thumbnails – problem / conclusion and next step

There is option to choose where users want to crop thumbnails from the image.

Click on ‘Edit’ button and this screen will appear.

Choose where from you want CouchCMS to crop thumbnail and click ‘Recreate’. Then ‘Save’. Refresh page and a new created thumbnail should appear on the screen.

Problem

Even thought, creating a new thumbnail sounds so simple, it is not!
After refreshing the page, nothing happened!
I checked files on the server and it showed that new thumbnail was created, even in the right size, but it did not update on the website.

Conclusion from tests
Even thought a new thumbnail is created, the path (link) to the right thumbnail is not created.

Next step
Further investigation is needed to find out how to change the path to the right thumbnails.

Fall back option
Removing thumbnail editing option for the client and leaving only the upload part controlling the main and thumbnail image size.

Automatic resizing pictures in CouchCMS

The interesting fact was, that CouchCMS automatically resized any picture that was uploaded.

The picture that I uploaded had 525kB. After uploading it on the server, it had 216kB.

Also, the max size of uploaded file has to be 2MB or less.

Locating where uploaded images are stored

Next task was to find out where are pictures stored after uploading through CouchCSM.

 

!!!To make sure that I was doing it like the client would do, I created separate folder away from working files and upload images from there to avoid any crashing files!!!

Running php_info() file on the server

Create phpinfo.php file and type in –

Upload it to the server and run the file. For example, http://www.domain.com/phpinfo.php

Scroll down and try to find GD section –

This means that GD library is supported on the server.

Uploading the pre-processed image on the website

Once, I was sure that the image quality is right, I uploaded it to the website through Couch CMS.

Result was still blurred –

I tried to change thumbnail size in gallery.php as it was advised on CouchCMS forum but it had no effect!

Using Mozilla Debuger

Mozilla Debuger is great tool that allows you to find out layout of any website and find code for it. This is what I used to find out why are thumbnails blurred, maybe it was causing ‘overlay effect’ that was set on thumbnails.

I found out that thumbnail container is made larger by CSS which expands container to 100% and that is why ‘pixalation’ is occurred.

After cancelling width:100% –

This is the evidence that thumbnails are automatically created right without being ‘pixalated’ but CSS settings are making it ‘pixalated’.

CouchCMS has automatically generated thumbnails from pictures and it is done in PHP code by interpolation utilizing the GD Library on the server.  PHP GD Library is the standard image processing library in php and image generation and manipulation depends upon this library to work. (Read more here)

Next step

• Run php_info() file on the server to find out if it is supported, what version is there and other settings
• Locate files where uploaded images are stored