Forum OpenACS Development: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib

1: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 11/03/03 09:20 PM

I've just committed a "pre-release" copy of photobook to contrib/packages/photobook.

As the description in the .info file says, it's not finished and contains Sloan-specific code. We have a lot more work to do on it yet. Anyone who chooses to work with it in the near future needs to know that it is a moving target.

We don't have a timetable for future enhancements yet, but since the package is in production use at Sloan, we know they will happen.

In the meantime, as Philip used to say, Caveat Nerdor! :)

Oh, almost forgot the credits. Most of the work was done by Jeff Davis. Don Baccus, Tom Jackson and I have all tweaked bits and pieces.

2: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 1)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 11/03/03 09:50 PM

Thank you Janine, Sloan, Jeff, Don and Tom!!

3: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 1)

Posted by tammy m on 11/06/03 03:04 AM

What does photobook do and how is it different from photo-album package? I am just wanting a basic overview, no major comparison necessary;) thanks.

4: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 3)

Posted by Jeff Davis on 11/06/03 11:46 AM

Photobook has user profiles (work, education, personal details, home address, photo, etc) rather than being a photo album.

Unfortunately, I think the name will cause no end of confusion. Do people think it should be changed?

7: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 4)

Posted by Randy O'Meara on 11/07/03 03:50 AM

Jeff/Janine,

Can you expand what you mean by "user profiles"? Is this an extension of persons or parties? If so, would this functionality be easily extracted and used in a general manner to add other bits of data related to an individual person?

IIRC, there was mention in a thread in the recent past (related to new packages/capabilities of .LRN) about personal information whose visibility could be set to private, public, etc. Does Photobook provide or utilize these features?

Thanks,

Randy

8: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 7)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 11/07/03 04:35 PM

Randy,

This package is based on the CR. It uses the data from persons/parties as a starting point (so it can display a profile for any registered user, even if they haven't entered any data yet) but it collects lots of other stuff (info about previous academic work, employment, addresses, personal stuff like your favorite movie) and stores it all in the CR. Eventually we will build in the ability for an admin to completely customize the fields and categories, but for now they are hard-coded to what Sloan needed.

Everything in a new profile is suppressed by default except for their name and a couple of other general things about them (I think it's program and graduation year). They can choose to unsuppress the rest of the data as they wish, by category and by field. Not all fields are individually suppressable; again, this was done to Sloan's specifications.

dotLRN is not required to use photobook, but in it's current configuration it wouldn't really make sense if the users weren't students.

9: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 8)

Posted by Randy O'Meara on 11/08/03 01:52 AM

Thank you, Janine. This might be my opportunity to become familiar with the CR...

10: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 9)

Posted by Randy O'Meara on 11/08/03 02:36 AM

And it's Oracle only...

11: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 10)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 11/19/03 07:08 PM

I have done a very initial port of the Photobook package to postgres. It's still rough and you have to apply some patches to acs-content-repository and cms to get it working, one of which requires PG7.3. I'll try to get checked in soon but for now anyone who wants to work with it please contact me and I'll give you a tarball and some hints.

Why would you want to use Photobook?
    You want to collect and display profile info.
    For Sloan (ie photobooks current configuration) it collect demographic info, employers, schools and degrees, several addresses and of course a photo.
    Has some cool data like a huge list of schools around the world.
    Users have some control over what data is suppressed from display to other users.
    If you want to create functionality to manage giving your users mailto:screenname@yoursystem.com email addresses, the code to manage Sloan's EFL might be a good starting point.

What's the bad news?
    Needs a programmer to customize, not web configurable.
    Not trivial to install.
    Various places in the code say "sloan" and contain very Sloan specific logic.
    Still some rough spots in terms of bugs and some of them are in CMS and CR.

My next step is to customize it for another client. I'm sure I will have more good and bad points after that process.

Bottom line: seems very useful, if you are comfortable programming in OACS definitely try it out. If you're not a programmer it's not ready yet.

5: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 1)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 11/06/03 03:13 PM

It was called photobook because that's what it was designed to emulate at Sloan. We do a printed book every year containing a photo of each student and some biographical information, which we refer to as the photobook. This package was intended to look as much like that book as possible in online form, and in the future the person responsible for printing the real photobook will get their info from Sloan's installation of this package. Hence the name.

I have no problem with changing the name.

6: Re: ANN: Photobook module added to contrib (response to 1)

Posted by Alfred Essa on 11/06/03 11:00 PM

I have never liked the term photobook for this. Profiles might be more apt.