Re: [Ids-devel] help test IDS 0.81

[asja <as...@se...>]

Hallo,
I am currently using IDS 0.81 successfully, i find it very stable and
mature, yet i would like to tell you some of my wishes and observations:

1- First, maybe the only "bug" in IDS: if there is any problem accessing
   an image (corrupt file, bad permissions, other troubles), let's
   say, a .jpg file, in an album, IDS fails showing me even the album
   thumbnails, and bails infamous errors like:
   "Software error:
   Warning 330: Unable to open file (...)
   [Permission denied] at /idsShared.pm line 611."

   It would be better if IDS let me see the album and just warn me about
   the damaged file when i try to access it (or mail the admin, or whatever
   you find useful but not alerting users this way!).

2- In the album's thumbnails view, i think it is important to have a
   "NEXT" and a "PREVIOUS" page link, just because i am currently running
   directories with THOUSANDS photos (over 16000 photos in the entire
   gallery) and the album's page looks awful
   ie: http://earth-sky-water-fire.org/cgi-bin/ids/index.cgi?mode=album&album=/water/reefs%2cfishes%2csea%20life/small
   Users often get lost browsing those albums, and if i don't use very evident
   link colors it's very annoying figuring out which page is actually shown.
   Even worse: the page # links are not properly formatted, sometime they
   look very messy, unless you use monospaced fonts (ugly!!) what about tables?

3- I would love to customize the link of "main page" shown in each IDS
   generated page, as i have a quite complex homepage and i would not
   transform it into an IDS template (it also uses SSI and other CGIs..)

4- I would like to add a downloader helper to IDS, which takes the images
   from the server filesystem and gives them to users, without allowing
   direct downloading. This should be useful to implement other features,
   like access counters, download restrictions based for example on file
   size or system time (i did it with an humble workaround, but it works)
   and also anti-mirroring triggers and alerts.
   Well i know two things about this: first of all, it could affect
   performances, so it should be enabled only on sysadmin's demand, and
   then that all of these features could be implemented in other ways
   (apache directives, tiny patches, general purpose wrappers and so).
   However i find that having this feature built into IDS would be nice.

5- Sometime ago i saw a "static version" of ids floating around (maybe on
   your website) which was not supported by you. I suspect it worked
   "rendering" each webpage in the gallery and storing it on the disk into
   a static tree. I would love to have a look at it, because i could need
   to put up a mirror site for my collection on a CGI-less webserver.
   It could improve performances too, losing a bit of flexibility.

Besides those little details, your program is great. Just one of the most
powerful-yet-simple tools i've found around, and i am very happy with it.

I am not a perl programmer, but as always i'll test your software on my
quite big gallery, and can help you coding C helpers, if you wish.

Best regards
.asja

--
as...@se...
http://earth-sky-water-fire.org