[ansel] Ansel Questions

[Michael Rubinsky]

Quoting "John H. Bennett III" <bennettj at thebennetthome.com>:

> Been playing with Ansel and I have a few questions:
>
> 1.  What is a Slug and why would I use it?  From what I could find  
> out, it looks like it should be a way for me to browse directly to a  
> gallery via http://mydomain.com/gallery/slug_name.  Is this correct,  
> as I couldn't get this to work?

A slug is a short name given to a gallery as another way to identify  
it. For the term's origin, see:  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_(production).

In order to use that style of url, you need to enable appropriate  
rewrite rules for your webserver. Default rules are provided for  
Apache, and for lighttpd. There is an admittedly small blurb about  
this in the INSTALL file.


>
> 2.  I was able to embed a gallery on a website and it showed all of  
> the pictures. Is there a way to embed just a single picture from a  
> gallery or multiple galleries?  The links section only provides a  
> link to the whole gallery.

Yea, there is an open ticket to provide more examples of this. Need a  
better interface for doing this, since there are so many  
possibilities, plus, it's fairly easy for someone with horde knowledge  
to add his/her own embedded style.  Anyway, it is indeed possible to  
embed a single picture, or in fact, multiple pictures from different  
galleries, you can choose the thumbnail size and style, and even  
dynamically page multiple images. You can open the images in a  
lightbox overlay instead of navigating back to the Ansel site, or you  
can just not provide any links.

I'll try to start some documentation for this, probably on the wiki to  
start, then migrate it to the help files, whatever they end up being  
for Horde 4. In the meantime, some examples:

To embed image(s) from any galleries (can mix galleries), and show the  
screen sized image in a lightbox overlay instead of navigating to ansel:
<code>
<script  
src="http://example.com/horde/ansel/xrequest.php?requestType=Embed/images=5122:1851:5153:2072:3049:4894/container=example/thumbsize=prettythumb/lightbox=true" type="text/javascript"><div  
id="example"></div>
</code>

You can remove links altogether by providing '/hidelinks=true/' to the  
url parameters.

You can specify a specific thumbnail size by changing 'thumbsize.'  
Valid values: screen, mini, thumb, prettythumb. prettythumb / thumb  
are the same size, but 'thumb' forces basic thumbnail style (no pretty  
effects).

You can indicate a specific thumbnail style by passing something like  
'/style=ansel_polaroid/'

You can limit the number of images to show, and specify what image to  
start at for a single gallery by passing either gallery_slug or  
'gallery_id', along with 'count' and 'start'

You can find other examples by looking at the source for my family  
website's blog. All the images on that blog are embedded using Ansel.  
http://rubinskyfamily.com


>
> 3.  I could only find two ways to search for photos based on tags.   
> One was clicking on browse, then using the tag cloud box and  
> clicking on the tag, and the other was once I was in a gallery,  
> clicking on tags.  Am I missing anything here?

Indeed, the weakest part of Ansel, IMO is the search. This will be  
addressed in Ansel 2, and is on the roadmap.


Thanks,
mike

--
The Horde Project (www.horde.org)
mrubinsk at horde.org

"Time just hates me. That's why it made me an adult." - Josh Joplin