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