Features in creating a photo album

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9/14/2009 4:41:41 AM
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Features in creating a photo album

Some things I maybe should make mojoportal even better.

I often use the galleries function for pictures. And heres some thins I think should make this even better.

- The opton to upload several pictures at the same time
- Option to rearrange pictures in order after uploading them
- Ability to klick to the next picture in the album you are watching

9/14/2009 10:33:39 PM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

The following comments apply to the Simple folder gallery.

Uploading several pictures with the same operation is already possible as of version 2.3.1.7. You just select multiple files in the file open dialog by holding by down the control key and clicking on the pictures you want. Ctrl+A to select all files in the folder should work even though I have not tried that yet.

Numbering the pictures at the beginning of the file names will control the display order. If you want to change the order after uploading you have to you the File manager on the Admin page. I would like to see someone add the possibility to do this when browsing the picture gallery.

Thumbnails of pictures are provided to click on the next and previous pictures in the gallery.

9/15/2009 8:07:46 AM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

Yes over time we will continue to evolve the Image Gallery, and possibly make some enhancements for managing the folder gallery but these things will take time as we have a lot of other things to work on as well.

I think we always face the problem that mojoPortal has a Gallery but its not as slick as some software that is only for Galleries, mojoPortal has a blog but there is software out there that is only a blog and has more features, mojoPortal has forums but the features are not as rich as software that is only forums.

While we may not have the best of each thing we do have it all nicely integrated and that is the big value of mojoPortal. We will continue to evolve but realize that we have to evolve on a lot of different fronts. Rome was not built in a day as they say.

Best,

Joe

9/15/2009 10:52:59 AM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

Directing the development and features of a product like mojoPortal is a delicate balancing act. Sometimes user requests conflict or users have different priorities.

We want many features, but at the same time keep the simplicity of deploying and managing. Having everything integrated in mojoPortal is a big plus compared to having to integrate many single purpose solutions into one website even though single purpose solutions can have more features as mentioned.

Product management of a product like mojoPortal requires the guts to say no when a feature request benefits one specifc user or group of users but complicates things for the rest of the user base.

This is more easily done with open source projects because commercial software vendors often find it hard to reject requests from paying customers even though it is known that everyone suffers in the long run if the request is implemented.

I think the mojoPortal project benefits from having been directed by a single developer with a clear vision on what he wanted to accomplish.

In my opinion mojoPortal is a fairly complete CMS and portal as it is. Still there are few bits here and that might be added and some features improved.

I hope I am not flaming someone if I say that in my opinion mojoPortal would benefit by removal of some features. The support for multiple databases and the Mono runtime must take some development effort and makes it a more complicated task to contribute to the project. Targeting Microsoft .NET and MS SQL server only would also make it easier to utilize features only available on those platforms.

I do realize that the portability is important for some users and I wish them the best with their installations. But portability comes at a price that is sometimes not recognized. One example is Oracle vs MS SQL server. Even though Oracle is a good database server, installing it and managing is far more cumbersome than the MS SQL Server. I believe part of the reason is because that Oracle is multiplatform but MS SQL Server is not.

9/15/2009 11:34:11 AM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

You are right it is a delicate balance both in terms of my goals for the project and my personal goal to make a living doing this. I'm not saying no, I'm just saying not now, not this minute. Things will evolve in all the features in due course.

I have no plans to abandon support for Mono nor any of the supported dbs. Its a little more work to support all these dbs but its not as much more as you may think. Others who develop custom modules don't have to support more dbs but things included in the core or the core feature set do have to support more dbs. If someone contributes a feature that I find very valuable and they only implement MS SQL I am willing to implement the other databases, this is how it worked for the Poll and Survey and Content Workflow that were all contributed by community members.

Supporting Mono requires only a little extra attention for case sensitivity and file paths, any problems are typically Mono bugs so testing and reporting to the Mono team is also part of the process. Yes we pace ourselves against what is supported in Mono but it does not hold us back much, we already target .NET 3.5 SP1 much to the chagrin of even some windows users who wish we could still run in 2.0 .NET.

My biggest challenge is that I do not have a lot of time to coordinate the efforts of others who would like to help. If I were already profitable I would make more time for this and encourage more community contribution but in my experience often when people want to help they end up using more of my time than it would have taken me to implement the feature myself and this merely slows me down on my own work and ultimate slows progress rather than speeding it up. Rock star level senior developers are able to help without too much of my time and direction but this is not the average person who offers to help so I can really only receive help efficiently depending on who is offering help, what they prospose and how throroughly they propose it and whether I see enough value in it to commit my own time to working with them. Its very difficult for me to know what level of developer is offering help. The really good ones either submit a detailed propsal of what they want to change/implement and how they plan to do it or else they just send me finished product that is so good I naturaly agree to include it. But even reviewing code takes a biit of time and I only let stuff in if I think the quality is good enough for me to own and maintain the code going forward.

I remember how the  Rainbow Portal Project encouraged too many people to help, gave too many people committ access and they all coded in different directiosn with no strong leader coordinating things, it finally seems to have self imploded at this point.

If you look at the track record of mojoPortal I think you will see it is evolving faster than many projects who have more developers in spite of the fact that I'm doing the vast majority of the work myself and supporting all these databases and providing support in the forums. So something must be right about my process if I'm gaining ground on these more established projects with teams of developers.

Best,

Joe

9/15/2009 2:02:28 PM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

Hello

This is my first post here, started working with mojo last week. First of all I am very impressed, first CMS System based on MSSQL which is working fine for me. Thanks for sharing this. 

Reading this thread I found that in my version 2.3.1.7 I am not able to select more than one file to upload to the gallery, I tried this also in your Online Demo. Also Ctrl-A didnt work. Maybe its a client problem (windows7) or I have to less Experience in mojo. So even this isnt the Bug Forum I want to ask this here.

Thanks
Peter
Austria

 

9/15/2009 2:51:39 PM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

Peter P:

Adding multiple pictures works on my workstation using Vista and IE8. Also Ctrl+A.

The only think I can think of is that you need to have Flash 8 or a later version installed for this to work.

regards -Finnur

9/15/2009 3:03:20 PM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

It works in the Simple Folder Gallery but not in the Image Gallery.

Hope it helps,

Joe

9/15/2009 5:09:31 PM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

Yes, adding developers to a project can easily slow it down. I myself am experiencing this on a project that I oversee. A contractor helping me out has taken up so much of my time that I think I could have finished the task myself in a shorter time than it has taken me to support him.

Also making sure that the quality is OK can be a constant struggle. Some of the big-name open source CMS's have been badly hurt by low quality.

The pace of development of mojoPortal since I started following it last spring has been very fast. The productivity level is obviously very high so please don't do anything to hurt that.

Software metrics data tells us that differences in productivity level between teams can be very high. The differences between individual developers can vary even more, easily tenfold. mojoPortal is just one more data point to support the metrics that claims some developers can deliver far more than the industry average.

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I ran the mojoPortal source code through the Practiline Source Code Line Counter.

The count only includes the project source code, C#, Javascript and SQL. Only non-comment, non-blank lines where counted. All third party reused code, generated code and designer code was excluded. This gives the so-called physical line count. The exclusion was rather rough as I did not have time to check each file but rather relied on the file names to infer the kind of content.

Anyway my result was that mojoPortal v2.3.1.6 consists of about 180 thousand physical source lines. Practiline can not report logical source lines but my experience from other counting tools suggest that logical line count is about 46% of the physical line count for C# code.

That means about 83 thousand logical source lines for mojoPortal.

Assuming 34 logical source lines for each Function Point which is common for C++/C#/Java like programming languages, this means that mojoPortal is about 2400 function points.

Industry average is around 11 hours of work for each function point.

This means 26400 hours would be needed to develop mojoPortal with average developers. Assuming 1500 working hours per developer per year means that 17.6 man-years would be needed to develop mojoPortal.

Given that Joe Audette has been actively supporting mojoPortal since the project started in 2004 we can only assume that his productivity is at least five times the industry average.

We the fans of mojoPortal can only hope that employers looking for top-notch developers won't steal Joe from us.

9/15/2009 5:24:20 PM
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Re: Features in creating a photo album

Finnur,

Your analysis just made my day!

Thanks so much!

Cheers,

Joe

9/16/2009 8:39:46 AM
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Total Posts 14

Re: Features in creating a photo album

Thanks for help, and and sorry to hear that its only possible in Folder Gallery. Maybe somtimes it will be available in image gallery also I hope.
Thanks again
Peter

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