[SOLVED] UCP - how to upload photo's to existing categories?

[finack]

Hello,

Thanks for creating this software. We are testing several galleries and Phoca looks to be the winner by far.

We're running Joomla 1.5.23 with the most current Phoca Gallery component, bookmark and gallery plugins. We've setup two galleries successfully. After reading through the doc's and experimenting we have got everything setup the way we want it except for one issue that is very confusing to us.

Front End Editing via User Control Panel. We've followed the directions for setting up UCP. I have 3 users setup in Joomla. 2 administrators and 1 super admin. I have the UCP Global Param's setup so they are authorized to do everything they need. I even went as far as editing the access upload permissions for the given categories and assigned them the needed permissions.

I simply want the 2 administrators to login via the frontend and add photo's to the 2 existing categories. I login with their credentials and click on the UserUpload link I created for UCP. UCP opens. Why can't they choose the existing categories I created? They have the permissions to do so via the category permissions in the backend. I even tried assigning category ownership to one of the admins to see if that would help and pointing/selecting the category folder as the assigned FOLDER. This only allows him to have access to one category to upload images to. If you assign access rights to a category for a given user and then assign them access rights to upload to this category, then it would seem logical that this user has permissions to upload to this category. But instead we're tripped up with having to create a main category for this user that has nothing to do with what we are trying to do. Huge disconnect at his point.

We are also confused about some wording in the User CP setup directions about a "Category View".

You as an administrator can upload and publish pictures from the backend. Sometimes you want your users to upload some pictures from the frontend. Users can upload images in frontend two ways. In User Control Panel or directly in Category view.

Is this Category View what we see when logged in through the backend? Or is this some type of view that UCP Front End users can see? If this is a view for UCP then how do we get this view?

Thanks for all your hard work. Marvelous product. I'm sure there's and easy fix or we're missing something very obvious. Wouldn't be the first time and won't be the last.

[Jan]

Hi, see:
https://www.phoca.cz/documents/2-phoca-g ... d-glossary

There are two different views:

Category View - category view displays list of images in category and everyone can upload image to to current category if he/she has right to do

UCP - is user control panel for every user, here user can upload images, create main category and subcategories but only for his/her main category. Every user can have one own main category which can be managed in UCP ... in UCP you cannot upload to other user's category, it is only your own UCP. In category view you can upload images to every category where you have rights to do.

Jan

[finack]

Hi, see:
https://www.phoca.cz/documents/2-phoca-g ... d-glossary

There are two different views:

Category View - category view displays list of images in category and everyone can upload image to to current category if he/she has right to do

UCP - is user control panel for every user, here user can upload images, create main category and subcategories but only for his/her main category. Every user can have one own main category which can be managed in UCP ... in UCP you cannot upload to other user's category, it is only your own UCP. In category view you can upload images to every category where you have rights to do.

Jan

Hi Jan,
Thanks for the response. Not sure why I didn't get the email. Anyways, your explanation helped.
My main goal was to allow the website owner to, upload, delete, unpublish/publish photo's without having to login to the backend. All galleries are called from various articles in Joomla.

Category View was the obvious choice once I understood it better and we got rid of UCP as this isn't the tool for what we needed. I removed all photo's and directories associated with Phoca Gallery and reinstalled PG and started over. We followed the Quick Start guide. We made the menu link to Category View only seen via front-end login, then called galleries we wanted the public to see via articles with the gallery plugin code. Works great. Thank you. So this is solved.

Intersting Observations of your coding:
Your code does some interesting/smart magic. One quick curiosity question. When we followed the guide, we setup one main container directory that's sole purpose is to hold the subdirectories. The direcory structure was created via cpanel. We uploaded the photo's to their respective subdirectories via cpanel. Then from the backend of Joomla, followed the directions through PG component, images, multiple add, checked the top level directory and clicked SAVE. Magically your code must search any subdirectories contained within and create a thumbs directory for any pictures it found. Very nice but not obvious at first (which is my fault for questioning the documentation).

What we were doing wrong in the initial PG install was, when choosing multiple add, we were actually traversing to the subdirectory and clicking save. This was causing weird issues as PG wasn't seeing the top level container directory, thus only listing subdirectories with no parent directory within the PG component GUI. Now that we understand we only need to Click Save on the top level directory and PG will search through subdirectories, what happens when we add an additional subdirectory. Should this category/subdirectory be added through PG component instead of cpanel from here on out?

If we add an additional subdirectories via cpanel with pictures and use the Multiple Add technique via PG component and click Save, what happens. IS the PG component smart enough to see that it's already created thumbs directory for the other subdirectories and skip those till it finds the one with pictures but no thumbs directory? Sorry to be anal, just want to make sure we are doing this correctly in the future.

Thanks Jan.

[Jan]

Hi, in fact this is really complicated system (in fact explained here in the forum in different posts)

1) there is independent file system and database layer - folder means not category, in multiple add you can see file system on your server - folders, images. If you add the selected folder or folders to the Phoca Gallery, then Phoca will create category from folder, but this is not a rule, you can create more categories and get the images from one folder, ...

2) if the folder is called the same like the category and you will add an image to the category, after clicking on multiple add save button, Phoca Gallery will recognize, such category exists and only adds new image into the system.

3) the independent layer system allows to have e.g. one image in more categories - only one original image and thumbnails for one image can exists and used in many categories, ...

Jan