New Module: Favourites

Please Download from Gallery Modules

A simple module that will put a star by each photo... which you can click to add to your favourites. You can then click "view" to view your favourites photos.. and then save this list which will e-mail the site owner and the viewer a url to see the favourites again.

There's configuration screen that allows you to set the e-mail address of the site owner (probably you) and the from e-mail address for all e-mails coming from the site.

This module is kind of like a lightbox feature. I've built it so that wedding photographers can share an album to a client who can then choose there favourites and inform the photographer.

For security reasons I'd recommend that you only use this module for registered users. (there's a checkbox in the configuration...)... otherwise an automated system maybe able to make use of the e-mail facility to send spam, Alternatively you could extend this module to include a captcha or something.

Anyway.. let me know if you have any problems.. only tried this on two systems so there maybe some teething problems.

Can one of the admins as well create me a documentation page to put the documentation for this module in? Cheers

Ben

Benjamin Albert Smith - Photography
Pikitia - New Zealand Photography

It's nice, but the graphics are terrible :P!
For now, one issue for me: When you go to your Favorites album, an annoying warning will be shown on the top saying that the album is not writable.

Thanks

For the RTL issue, these will do the job:

/* RTL support */
.rtl .icon-f {
   right: 0;
   left: auto;
   }
.rtl #f-view-link {
   float: left;
   }
.rtl #f-view-link a {
   left: 0;
   right: auto;
   }
.rtl #f-save-link {
   float: left;
   }
.rtl #f-save-link a {
   left: 0;
   right: auto;
   }

You can easily create your own graphics for this.. just change favourites/images/faves.png... :P

I'm not sure what to do about the "Favourites album is not writable" message. The message is correct as it's not writable (it doesn't actually exist!).. If I pretend that it's writable then the "add photos" and "add an album" menu items will appear though not work properly! I'll have a think to see if there's a way round it.. ...I think those messages only appear when you are logged in as an administrator.

I will add those options now TAZ..

Ben

Benjamin Albert Smith - Photography
Pikitia - New Zealand Photography

I didn't thoroughly test this, but it looks like if you edit the index function in controllers/favourites.php to look like this, then the menu's go away:

    $template = new Theme_View("page.html", "collection", "favourites");
    $template->set_global("page", $page);
    $template->set_global("page_title", null);
    $template->set_global("max_pages", $max_pages);
    $template->set_global("page_size", $page_size);
    //$template->set_global("item", $album);
    $template->set_global("children", $album->viewable()->children($page_size, $offset));
    $template->set_global("children_count", $children_count);
    //$template->set_global("parents", $album->parents());
    $template->content = new View("dynamic.html");

    print $template;

And it will be nice if you added the RTL support to the css file, too.

The theme makers don't know about every module made for G3, so they write RTL support for their theme components. The module developers should write the required RTL support for anything else in their modules. I completely understand that you don't want to increase the file size, making it heavy to load, but I do think that we're talking about some essential support here, rather than improvement/luxury.

Thanks.
By the way, Both 'Item view only' and 'Both views' in the admin interface are not translatable.

Glooper,
Just wondering if you had a chance to sort out the album-item-or both issue?

Seems no matter which selection you choose from the "Please choose where a user can select their favourites" on the admin panel, the only choice given to the user is to add an "item" to their favorites (the "Both views" and "Album view only" does not seem to be working).
Thanks!

That would be great...thanks!

Added both the RTL stuff and the rWatcher fixes.

Cheers
Ben

Benjamin Albert Smith - Photography
Pikitia - New Zealand Photography

So rather than having favourite photos... you would only have favourite albums.. ?

I dont really understand why you'd want to do that? Or perhaps I'm still missing something!

Can be easily done.. I'll do it tomorrow morning.

Ben

Benjamin Albert Smith - Photography
Pikitia - New Zealand Photography

To add to this, if it's selected from admin not to email when a user clicks on 'Save', it can just bring up a prompt that reads. "Bookmark this page now!"... or something like that.
Or unless the jobs get saved in the database and are there when the user logs in. If so, the prompt could read "These are now saved on your Favourites list!"

I wasn't for sure if it's setup to use cookies or saved in the database.

Thanks again,
Scott

Thanks so much Glooper. I'll install it later and check it out.
Very nice module that's a 'must have' on my website.

I appreciate your time!

Thanks!
Scott

2 posts up..

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

Glad your finding this module useful. I'm afraid I won't get a chance to add any more features to this module for a long time. However the persistence is possible now. If you use the e-mail feature to e-mail yourself your favourites list then each time you click on the link in the email it will show that exact favourite list.

Ben

Benjamin Albert Smith - Photography
Pikitia - New Zealand Photography

I've just added this module to my gallery, configured it and tested... After I've filled in the e-mail form and hit Submit, the pop up tells me

{"result":"success","location":"\/g3\/index.php\/favourites"}

I assume there should be a proper message instead? Did I miss out on any steps? Do I need to add variables and text to Gallery's language file or something?

Second question - When you send your favourites list to someone, the form contains a comment field but the standard e-mail text doesn't include that comment - What variable can I use in the e-mail template to include the comment?

Thanks for your quick response! Yes, %comments works in the e-mail. I'd tried %comment but that didn't work.

It would be awesome if you could look into the success message issue at some point. I'm loving the module.

Thanks for the great module, one question. I have it set up to send emails to the site owner and a copy to the favorite client, but it only sends to the client and not the site owner. Any suggestions?

One thing we just came across today.

Issue:
We had a user try to navigate to page two of our favourites. On page two see a duplication of images that were on page one of favourites.

I know that all the favourites are displayed on one page, but can the page navigation at the bottom be dropped? It confused one of our users today.

[img]http://www.blackhillsbadlands.com/bhphotos/bhm01.png[/img]

[img]http://www.blackhillsbadlands.com/bhphotos/bhm02.png[/img]

All in all GREAT MODULE!

Few additional questions / suggestions:

Is there an admin function to see all the favorite lists that were saved and emailed? Also, a way delete or clear out all saved favorite lists?

As many others I like this module very much but wanted to really save the users favourites instead of emailing it. As I'm just a learning-by-doing-coding-newbie I had to keep it simple.
Because I don't use the url-field of a user I thought it would be a good candidate to (mis)use this url-attribute for storing the favourites url which is normally emailed.

1) I choose for saving the favourites url every time a photo is selected or deselected. So it's auto saving.
In favourites/controllers/favourites.php I added to the function "toggle_favourites"

$user = ORM::factory("user")->where("name", "=", identity::active_user()->name)->find();
$user->url = $favourites->getUrl();
$user->save();

so the function looks now like this:

public function toggle_favourites($id){
  $favourites = Favourites::getOrCreate();
  $infavour = $favourites ->toggle($id);

  $user = ORM::factory("user")->where("name", "=", identity::active_user()->name)->find();
  $user->url = $favourites->getUrl();
  $user->save();

  $title = $infavour?t("Remove from favourites"):t("Add to favourites");
  json::reply(array("result" => "success",
                    "favourite" => $infavour,
                    "hasfavourites" => $favourites->hasFavourites(),
                    "title" => (string)$title));
}

2) I added an new user_login event to load a saved url when a user logs in.
In favourites/helpers/favourites_event.php I added to following function

   static function user_login($user) {
  
	if ($user->url) {
          $favourites = Favourites::getOrCreate();
          $favourites->clear();
          $array = explode("/",substr($user->url, strrpos($user->url, "view") + 5));

	    if (!empty($array[0])) {
              foreach($array as $i=>$item){
              $favourites->toggle($item);
              }
	    }

	  // url::redirect(item::root()->abs_url()) = G3 home page
	  // url::redirect($user->url)              = Favourites page
	  url::redirect(item::root()->abs_url());	  
    }
  }

That's all !

3) Optional: If you are not interested in emailing the link you can get rid of the "save" star in the favourites pseudo album by commenting out the five "f-save-link" lines in the favourites/css/favourites.css.

Any comments are welcome.

DGF,

I did a clean install of the favourites module and copy/paste the code as I decribed in my post. It works without a problem.

The only thing I can think of is that you added the "static function user_login" code exactly at the end of the favourites_event.php. Then you get a white page. With "adding" I meant adding as a new function, so just before the last curly brace "}" which marks the end of the "class favourites_event_Core".

For all users of this excellent module I present more shiny icons:
http://www.marktim.ru/files/regular/faves.png

Hope I don't break any copyrights. $)

http://photo.marktim.ru

Hi

So I now know this module uses php mail function. This is the problem as my web host has disabled this function and won't allow it(I have had many battles over this).

Any suggestions on how to get this to work with phpmailer?

Many thdnks