FAQ
- What are the server requirements?
- How do I create the folder and subfolders structure?
- What makes the gallery so fast?
- Where are comments stored?
- How does the visitor login to leave comments?
- How can I edit the image name and description as administrator?
- How can I sort folders and subfolders the way I want?
- How does email notifications work?
- How can display HTML content when the visitors clicks on a certain folder?
- How can I set a folder as private?
- Errors.. How do I check if something is wrong?
- How do I make the Image SiteMap work?
What are the server requirements?
- Your hosting provider must be set to run an ASP.NET MVC3 application in medium trust.
- File write permissions are needed within the folder your are storing the pictures, and within the folder you are storing the cached thumbnails.
- There are NO database settings to be worried about :).
If you hosting provider has .NET Framework 4.0 installed, even if ASP.NET MVC3 extensions are not installed, you can deploy them independently (by copying the appropiate binaries to the bin folder)
How do I create the folder and subfolders structure?
You just need to upload whatever structure of folders and subfolders you want to publish. The application will auto detect the folder hierarchy and render the proper folder tree and menu elements.
Once you have the structure, you can easily:
- Configure ignore filters
- Define sorting options for each folder
- Add a custom html introduction to each folder
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What makes the gallery so fast?
- It uses JSON to exchange data between the server and the client.
- It uses soft (memory) and hard (disk) caching on the server when generating the thumbnails
- It uses smart client pre-fetching when you are visualizing a certain picture or folder, so it is already warming up to display the next one
- It uses knockout.js for binding UI componentes to JSON data fetched from server in a very efficient manner.
You can also keyboard arrows to navigate!
If you click on the right/next arrows of your keyboard, you will navigate around images on the same folder.
If you use the up/down keys, you will navigate up and down the folder tree.
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Do you provide the **full** source code, so I can create my own application based on this?
Yes
topWhere are comments stored?
Comments, name, description and any other information related to each image is stored in a file called folderInfo.inc within every folder. Pretty similar to what Picasa (from Google) does, so you don't have to worry about databases, and you can move around folders and subfolders without losing any information.
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How does the visitor login to leave comments?
In order to leave comments, visitors need to login with any of OpenID provider
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How can I edit the image name and description as administrator?
You need to open aspnetphotogallery.config file and add your email address to the administrator list. Once you login using an OpenID provider with that email address, administration options will be displayed
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How can I sort folders and subfolders the way I want?
A pretty powerful and easy to customize sorting mechanism has been implemented. It works just by defining in each folder what the sorting algorithm will be (by default Name ASC)
Common scenarios:
- I want to order all folders by name ASC: do nothing
- I want to order all folders by name DESC: Set in the configuration SortAction=NameDesc
- I want to order all folders by any criteria of my choice: Set in the configuration SortAction=Custom and the set the Order attribute in each folder
How does email notifications work?
Every time a visitor writes a comment, a notification service is triggered, so you can be aware of the comment
To make it simple, Postmark service is being used (leave sending email to people who know how to do it), altough you can implement your own notification service using SMTP or similar (an interface is provided so you can implement your own)
So the only thing you have to do is:
- Sign up for PostMark (it is free for the first 1000 emails and really cheap if you don't have much traffic - worthy if you have it though)
- Get a Postmark API Key and paste it into your configuration file
How can display HTML content when the visitors clicks on a certain folder?
Again, simple, convention over configuration!!
Just drop a file named "content.html" in the actual target folder. The application will recognize it and will display the html contained on it instead of the first image of that folder.
Just a simple html file:
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How can I set a folder as private?
You just need to edit the config file associated to that folder like and set the PrivateFolder=true and then the list of users that are going to be able to access the folder like this:
Permissions are inherit so if you set a folder as private, the subfolders will be private too
topErrors.. How do I check if something is wrong?
Elmah is being use for error handling and logging:
Just point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/galleryinstallationfolder/elmah.axd
topHow do I make the Image SiteMap work?
The application indexes automatically the images and creates a Image Sitemap
To access the sitemap point your browser to http://yourdomain.com/galleryinstallationfolder/SiteMap
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