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Thanks Ben for your initial thoughts.
How about expanding your market to include artists with products that hang on walls? Photographers, painters, print makers, etc. Create a completely separate application that installs on the website host server. You then point it at the folder that contains all your site images, or it indexes them auto-magically. It provides a main file that can be embedded as a link somewhere. Prospective art clients are practically screaming for something like this. It doesn't exist anywhere except on a few high end "buy art on the internet" sites, and even then, with limited functionality.
I inquired with the developer of that ipad app and they weren't interested. I inquired with someone I know who does custom web development and he wasn't interested either. Asking you about it looks to be a third strike against the idea. I must be on to something, or crazy, either one ;-)
I use Backlight for my website and absolutely love it. Thank you for creating such a great product.
I participate in many art shows throughout the year. I get a ton of people coming through my booth that have a hard time visualizing what my art would look like on their wall. The classic quote is, "I need to go home and measure my wall first". Or, "should I get one of this size or two of another? What is the best way to fill the space?"
As a result, I have purchased a simple app for my iPad that I bring with me to the show. It is called Picture My Wall. In the app, you are able to upload an image of your wall, take a measurement, then place images on the wall, to scale, to see how they might look. I have used this tool successfully on a number of occasions to help drive sales.
The problem is, this is only for my iPad. They have to use it while at my booth. What I would truly love to have, is an extension to my website that does the same thing. Wouldn't it be great if they could do the same thing on their own time? That is where the Authors of Backlight come in. Could you write something that does what I describe? At a very high level, it would:
(1) Ability to import an image from the person's computer onto the site, so that artist images can be placed on top of it
(2) Ability to set a distance, such that images are placed onto the screen are in the correct proportion
(3) Ability to place multiple images of different sizes
(4) ability to choose standard sizes like 8x10, 20x24, as well as enter a custom size
(5) ability to freely arrange the images on the wall
(6) ability to change out one image on the wall, with another
(7) integrates with images already in your gallery
(8) includes a few stock images of living room wall, bedroom wall, den wall, etc, for folks who don't want to upload a picture of their own wall
(9) has as simple wizard based interface to guide folks through the visualization process.
(10) ability to drop images on the wall without a frame, or with a border and frame.
(11) Utility is disabled when viewing website from mobile device - there is just not enough real estate. Ipad or computer only.
(12) ability to save finished mock-up locally to disk as an image file.
(13) creates a simple link at the top of your website, that takes viewers to the utility. Similar to Gallery, About or Contact
I would be happy to work with you to come up with a detailed requirements document, describe use cases, etc.
NOTE: Many other 2-d artists would LOVE to have this tool. You could "shrink wrap it" into an extra $$$ add-on for Backlight.
Is this something that the authors would be interested doing? Anybody else out there who would want to buy and use this utility?
Thanks,
Jeff
Vancouver, WA
As suggested, it was an issue with .htaccess file. I had my Backlight based site under www.jpcgpdx.com/beta while I was developing it. This while I kept my then current flash-based site up and running. When the backlight site was ready for prime time, I backed up everything, removed my old site, and then moved the backlight site up one level to the root. Somehow, during this transition, I missed moving .htaccess. Seeing as it shows up in your file browser as a hidden file (greyed out), I'm not surprised. Found it and moved it. Problem solved!
Excellent product, by the way. I'm really happy with my new site! Kudos all!
When I first load my website, I can click on any of the items on my menu bar and they all work just fine: "Galleries", "About", "Contact", "Search" and "Prints". When I hover over the menu items, I see the URL formed like this: www.jpcgpdx.com/?page=about.
I then go into any of the gallery pages. The Gallery and Search menu items work fine. However, when I hover over any of my manually created menu items "About", "Contact" or "Prints", I see the URL formed like this: www.jpcgpdx.com/about/. This is incorrect. There is no such subdirectory on my site. Sure enough, when I click on the menu item, I get a 404 error - page not found.
How can I fix this? I thought this was under Menu Sets? I have these three menu items pointed to my manually created Pages. I have already cleared my cache and tried two different browsers.
Okay, I think I understand now, said the young padawan. It was a combination of old items in the browser cache. Learning about using F12 and disabling the use of the cache within Chrome helped. Also, I had to adjust the size of my thumbnails and re-publish them. Looking a lot better now
More information: I go into my album set template and change style from Iconic to Classic. I then go back to my home page by clicking my logo at the top of the screen. Nothing changes. When I click on Galleries link in the header menu, I see the different layout presented by switching to Classic. I am using Chrome with developer tools open and have turned off caching, so I am fetching from the server fresh every time.
Again, the question is, what drives the appearance on my home page? It doesn't appear to be the Album Set template.
My Home page is set to be my index page
I have inserted my Galleries Album Set to appear on this Home page
I go to my home page and I see my album set, with all the albums contained within with a fairly large margin between each thumbnail and the cell border. The amount of this margin changes as you adjust the screen size.
When I click Galleries menu item, I am again presented with all my albums (which is what I would expect). The formatting of the page has now changed. Each thumbnail fills each cell right up to the cell border. As you adjust the screen size, the thumbnails and cell sizes change in unison. The quality of each thumbnail is not as crisp either.
Why is it that both presentations are different? I thought they were both dependent on my Album Set template? Sure, I could live with this difference, but feel that there should be a consistent presentation throughout. What have I got wrong?
I can activate my guest admin account, if you want to take a look 'round.
Thanks.
Changing Album Set Style from Masonry to Iconic, and changing Thumbnail Coverage to Contain did the trick!
Is there a way to adjust column alignment in an album set? Right now, I am using Masonry layout with up to 5 columns across. The individual thumbnails within each column look to be left justified. Is there a way to make them center justified?
This issue has been resolved. For anybody else researching this, here is the solution: Go to your Go Daddy hosting admin console. Go to Software -> Select PHP Version. Make sure that all the PDO modules are checked (enabled). pdo, pdo_dblib, pdo_firebird, pdo_mysql, pdo_odbc, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite. After enabling these, I was still getting the error. So the Go Daddy tech rebooted the PHP service and that solved the problem. Case closed.
Thanks for the observations, Matt and Ben. Yeah, I've already run into that DOS issue. It's a pain. Maybe I can get them to toggle that down while I have them on the horn. We shall see.
Testing the waters with GoDaddy cPanel hosting. Running Backlight on that setup yields "Backlight requires the PDO, SQLite and XML modules". Does anybody here have any experience with setting that up on GoDaddy? I just got this new hosting and figure I have to enable a few things. Thought I'd ask in this forum, before hitting up GoDaddy tech support.
Updated. It works! I even got it to do 15% shipping charge.
Do I have to nuke it and start all over again?
How do I change that? I'm in Edit Product, but don't see a way to change the Product Type.
okay, let me update that...
emailed
Deleted all my previous work and started afresh.
Created product - Aluminum Print. It contains a Size attribute with 4 base options as well as a Finish attribute with 2 fixed options
I have my Default pricing scheme and it is associated with the Aluminum Print product. Pricing is set to zero.
Created new Pricing Scheme "Square" and associated it with Aluminum Print product
Filled in pricing for size (with a different amount for each size), then filled pricing in for Finish (with zero amount since this does not add any cost to the final product).
Both Default and Square pricing schemes now have a status of Complete
Then went to shipping and turned on Self-Collection
Enabled Standard Delivery and set it to default method
Went into Standard Delivery --> Manage Charges and nullified all the fields for Package Deluxe Set and Package Standard Set. I am not offering any Packages at this time. I DO NOT SEE anywhere for me to alter the pricing for my Aluminum Print product.
I am using Standard Album Template. I made sure that Cart is enabled along with Mixed Pricing
My admin page is up in Chrome
My live page is up in MS Edge - they are in completely different sessions. Resetting customer cart would do no good
My images under Sea and Sky album have their Category metadata set to Square.
The album that they are contained in, have their Cart Pricing Profile set to default.
All the images in this album are indeed Square. I want them to use the Square Pricing Scheme. It is my understanding that if you match up what is in the Category metadata with the name of your pricing scheme, it should pick it up.
I close and open my live page browser (Edge).
I go to my site. I make sure that Always Refresh from Server is turned on, and I clear my cache. I then reload my page and click on the cart icon for one of my images. Nothing! No Products are Availabe for Purchase. I just want to get this working for this one Product, then gradually add more products that will support more albums. Ultimately, I want multiple products that support a unique pricing scheme for each aspect ratio that my images come in (around 8 different kinds).
I have a guest admin setup for you to poke around with
Thanks for the offer of help, Rod and Ben. I am on the road for xmas. As such, I am going to put this thread on hold for a few days. I will pick it back up early next week.
I switched it back to using default, and now I still see no products available for purchase. It's like my switch back didn't even "take". I cleared browser cache, closed out of the browser, cleared template cache too. Nothing. Getting the meat of the site going with Backlight - I thought that was excellent. This Cart configuration is difficult, and I thought I was tech savvy. Humbling.
Created two products
Filled in Size and Presentation
Created the pricing scheme called Square
Associated the pricing scheme with my two products
I then filled in my prices
Already have an album that is cart enabled. I had it set to "default" cart
On my website, I noticed that only one of the products was listed for my image
I then changed the album to use my new "Square" pricing scheme
I made sure that my images had "Square" in the Category metadata. I made sure that my images have been refreshed on my website
Now when I click on the cart, I see no products available for purchase.
Trying to configure cart within Backlight. I have a basic cart-enabled album setup and functioning. When I click on the cart icon, I want to be able to choose from a couple of different products. Within each product, I want to be able to choose a size, and a presentation format (print only, print with matt, print with frame, etc).
How do I do this?
Okay, CE3 web publishing package and CE2 Cart it is then. I'm sure I won't have any more questions ;-)
Thanks Rod,
Still grappling with the overall architecture of the various plugins. So bear with me...
I would like to use Cart with any image that appears in my galleries. In other words, if I post an image to my website, it's "for sale". I will have multiple galleries (Black and White, Abstracts, Animals, etc).
Given this, would my Gallery pages be created with CE2? All other pages created with CE3 (Info, Contact, etc)?