[ansel] gallery ordering issue

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting "Heath S. Hendrickson" <heath at outerspaceconsultants.com>:

> Are you storing the images in the database as well?  I found that when I
> used MySQL for VFS storage that it was really slow.  When I moved to
> using filesystem storage it got much better...  but then again I'm using
> a PIII 600 w/512MB ram for my server, and it's running a lot of stuff.

Just a note that if you're using file-based VFS, you should look at the
vfs_direct option as well; much faster than piping the image data 
through a PHP
script.

> I don't know that a rewrite of Ansel is necessary, but you can probably
> tweak the DataTree code to be more specific in it's queries and not
> store so much data when you populate the image classes... maybe we need
> to sub-class some of the Ansel classes so that it's only populating data
> that it needs and not everything under the sun (throw in a
> print_r($image) and see what all is being maintained in memory).

Sure. Suggestions?

> Here's what I imagine the structure to be:

Not sure how the imagined structure is relevant to discuss, as opposed to
reality...

> I think part of the performance issue might be the fact that the
> database isn't being used in a very relational nature...it's a flat
> structure.  I had been playing around with a design on paper a while
> back that basically had a table for the gallery details (name,
> description, template, etc.), another table for the gallery image lists,
> and a third table for the actual image data (with a possible 4th table
> for the images themselves).  This way you can more efficiently pull the
> data from the database that is needed for a specific purpose (say,
> getting a list of all the galleries for the gallery list) and not have
> to pull all the data at once.

We don't pull all the data at once just to pull the gallery list.

> This way you can have an image in multiple galleries (for example, a
> Picture of the Day gallery and a topic gallery).

Could do that now, too, without much trouble.

> It also allows you to have dynamic galleries (by searching the 
> image_attributes table for specific data, say a date range or a 
> keyword/caption).

DataTree makes that sort of thing *extremely* easy.

> I guess my final thought is that it's better to do the redesign now
> while Ansel is still at 0.0.1 (and not listed as being part of the Horde
> 3.0 release anyway) than to try and do it once it's considered beta or
> stable...

What redesign?

> I know that I'm opening a big can of worms here, but if I just think
> that we should try and make Ansel the best that we can (I'd still like
> the ability to customize the display of each gallery based on a template

Already implemented... see the view/ directory.

> and the ability to have the same image in multiple galleries... but

Patch?

-chuck

--
"Regard my poor demoralized mule!" - Juan Valdez