ExpressionEngine: File Manager - codeigniter-2

I’m new to EE and trying to learn the basics. Some questions about the File Manager:
I upload a photo and put “cat, kitten” in the description. When I do a search for “kitten”, it finds the photo. But when I do a search for “cat”, I get nothing. Any ideas what’s going on?
The file metadata are: file title, file name, description, credit, and location. What if I wanted to add custom fields? How do I do that?
In the template files, how do I access a particular manipulation (I call this “rendition”) of an image? Say I define a rendition “thumbnail” to be 100x100. How do I access that particular rendition in a template?
Is there a way to randomize the file names of the files being uploaded?
After uploading an image and testing it against PageSpeed, it turns out that the image can still be optimized via losslessly compressing it. How can this problem be addressed?

Ah, the file manager. Not EE's brightest spot.
It would not surprise me if the search in the File Manager was not
very robust. I'd try more variations to narrow it down (what kind of
characters affect the results - commas, dashes, spaces, etc ... do
partial terms match?)
You cannot currently add custom metadata to files in the file manager.
Use this syntax: {field_name:rendition}, e.g.,
{my_image:thumbnail} (docs).
Nope.
EE just uses the GD library available in your PHP install to resize
images. If you want the highest possible optimization, you'll have
to do your image manipulations yourself.
Given your queries, I would suggest you have a look at Assets by Pixel and Tonic. It offers a far superior file management experience on most of these fronts.

Related

hwpf, xwpf, hssf, and xslf poi picture extraction

I'm looking to extract all images from new and legacy Word documents and spreadsheets to assist in a real time document classification system, and looking at the documentation, I seem to have run into a problem. I'm having no problems finding documentation within the hwpf module and packages for extracting images from the file, but when it comes to the other 3, it seems as though they don't support the same methods.
What I want to do is to have one block of code that is document type agnostic when it comes to the 4 above mentioned types, I just want fast, easy access to the pictures in the files so I can move on to my next task, but at this point it looks like only the hwpf module supports extraction of pictures or the methods in 'PicturesTable'.
I'm also somewhat concerned about the performance of the library: it looks like it loads the entire file when all I want to do is scrape the images out of it. Any suggestions on a library that operates directly on the 'Data' bytestream and the folder structure of the .***x zip files?
I've already tried using OLEtools to try to extract pictures from the streams, and I'm now moving on to this tool. I havn't tried any tools that operate on the lower levels of the documents yet though.

Create Multiple Slides from a List with Common Template

I have created a certificate design with powerpoint.
Now I have to create 100+ copies of it... each with a different name (the recipent).
I was wondering if there was an easy way to do it...
I can have the list of names in excel or txt.
I am open to other ideas as well, like changing the slide into an images and batch processing it in a simple way
You may also try out SlideMight, a tool for merging hierarchical data with PowerPoint templates. SlideMight supports iteration over data, to generate slides or to populate tables. There is more functionality, but you don't seem to need that. SlideMight is in fact a coding system, like mail merge for Word is.
Input data format is at this time just JSON; you would need to convert your Excel sheets first, e.g. using this Excel to JSON add-in for Excel.
There are versions for Windows and Mac OS X.
More information is at www.SlideMight.com
Disclaimer:
I am the owner of Delftware Technology, the company that developed SlideMight.
And I am one of the developers.
This is a question that really belongs in SuperUser, not StackOverflow (which is intended for coding questions, not software how-to-use questions).
But ...
Save your names to a plain notepad TXT file, one name per line.
Start PowerPoint, choose File, Open and point to your TXT file (you may force the matter by choosing . in Files of type:
Apply whatever template you like to the result.
I have a commercial add-in that'll do this and quite a bit more, but from your description, you don't need it.

Is there an efficient way in docpad to keep static and to-be-rendered files in the same directory?

I am rebuilding a site with docpad and it's very liberating to form a folders structure that makes sense with my workflow of content-creation, but I'm running into a problem with docpad's hard-division of content-to-be-rendered vs 'static'-content.
Docpad recommends that you put things like images in /files instead of /documents, and the documentation makes it sound as if otherwise there will be some processing overhead incurred.
First, I'd like an explanation if anyone has it of why a file with a
single extension (therefore no rendering) and no YAML front-matter,
such as a .jpg, would impact site-regeneration time when placed
within /documents.
Second, the real issue: is there a way, if it does indeed create a
performance hit, to mitigate it? For example, to specify an 'ignore'
list with regex, etc...
My use case
I would like to do this for posts and their associated images to make authoring a post more natural. I can easily see the images I have to work with and all the related files are in one place.
I also am doing this for an artwork I am displaying. In this case it's an even stronger use case, as the only data in my html.eco file is yaml front matter of various meta data, my layout automatically generates the gallery from all the attached images located in a folder of the same-name as the post. I can match the relative output path folder in my /files directory but it's error prone, because you're in one folder (src/files/artworks/) when creating the folder of images and another (src/documents/artworks/) when creating the html file -- typos are far more likely (as you can't ever see the folder and the html file side by side)...
Even without justifying a use case I can't see why docpad should be putting forth such a hard division. A performance consideration should not be passed on to the end user like that if it can be avoided in any way; since with docpad I am likely to be managing my blog through the file system I ought to have full control over that structure and certainly don't want my content divided up based on some framework limitation or performance concern instead of based on logical content divisions.
I think the key is the line about "metadata".Even though a file does NOT have a double extension, it can still have metadata at the top of the file which needs to be scanned and read. The double extension really just tells docpad to convert the file from one format and output it as another. If I create a straight html file in the document folder I can still include the metadata header in the form:
---
tags: ['tag1','tag2','tag3']
title: 'Some title'
---
When the file is copied to the out directory, this metadata will be removed. If I do the same thing to a html file in the files directory, the file will be copied to the out directory with the metadata header intact. So, the answer to your question is that even though your file has a single extension and is not "rendered" as such, it still needs to be opened and processed.
The point you make, however, is a good one. Keeping images and documents together. I can see a good argument for excluding certain file extensions (like image files) from being processed. Or perhaps, only including certain file extensions.

Naming convention for images in a large website

This is a question about organising lots of images in a web project. Say you had the following two icons in a web project that represeneted, for example, a product selected or a product not selected:
What would you name them?
Seems a simple question, but I suspect naming images is something of an art.
For example:
star_active.png and star_inactive.png: Seems fair enough but what if you want to replace the star at a later date with a circle say. Then your name is misleading so you would have to rename it and then update all your css etc.
product_selected.png and product_unselected.png: Great for the when used for the specific action of selecting a product but what if I wanted to use the same image for a different purpose. Then the name is confusing and too specific.
Should the image size be part of the image name? eg. someImage_16.png
What is the best naming convention you have found for naming images?
You're asking for a naming convention that predicts future attributes and applications of the file so that you never have to update the file name. That is impossible. You have to rely on your own intuition when you initially name the files.
There is no way around it. If you end up changing either a file or it's application so drastically that the file name no longer accurately reflects its use, then you will either need to keep the misleading name or replace it throughout your files.
Most decent text editors should be able to easily do the latter across multiple files.
The only alternative is to assign names which are not descriptive from the start, which is obviously not a good idea.
Listen to Kobi and look into sprites, or if you're averse to sprites, do it the way Arvin said for the reasons given.

Image Upload Service - Image locations and Image Identifiers

I would like to create a image uploading service (yes, i am aware of imageshack, photobucket, flickr...etc) :)
I have seen only imageshack show the directory names ("img294", "1646") of where the image is located, in the same way - i would like to do this.
http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/1646/**jquerykd5**.jpg
1) Are there any security issues I should be aware if i take this implementation?
2) How do these sites come up with short unique identifiers ("kd5")?
Thanks all for any advice and help.
Well for starters, unless you would like the directory to be public, put dummy index.html files in there or just restrict access to public users for those directories.
As for the unique identifiers there are many ways of going about this... some of my favourite chunks of information to use:
UNIX time (if running a unix based server)
chunks of the md5 of the file
pseudo random numbers
piece of the original filename
With these and many other pieces of information at your fingertips it should be easy to prevent duplicate image names conflicting on your server as well, you can gather as many as you like and concatenate them into a string for the filename. The md5 can be placed in a database as well to aid in a method of duplicate image detection, which could save you disk space as well.
I can promise you they all use URL rewriting. This will help with security issues, too.

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