Posts by Raven Falls

Raven Falls · Backlight 2 Support

Thanks. I'll send off that e-mail A.S.A.P.

I'm still a bit confused on what I'll be needing. Although I used Stage in my previous website, it appears it was for additional pages that didn't correspond to the usual things you'd find on a photo website -- for example, the "articles" section or the page describing my book. The description of Theater makes it seem to be more a multi-media presentation tool. Would I still need it for the "extra" pages of the type I described above, or would that functionality be built into BL2 as is?

Raven Falls · Backlight 2 Support

A few years ago, I built a new website (www.RavenFallsPhotography.com) using CE3. Although it was a massive pain to set it up, thanks to a lot of help from people here (especially Rod Barbee), I was able to complete a website with which I was very pleased.

...Until, of course, my hosting provider decided, without warning, to ditch all support for PHP 5.6 and anything else below 7.0. Now, my site prints error-code gibberish at the top of each gallery page...and, worse, the shopping cart is DOA. Combined, they mean that not only can't I sell prints from my site, but the whole thing looks like something that got abandoned years ago. Not good!

So, it looks like I need to bite the bullet and move to BL2, but I have several questions:

1) Can I do everything I've currently done on my site in BL2? You're invited to check my site at the link, ignoring the error messages and other issues. To give some perspective: in CE3, I was using the full Blog & Galleries bundle, plus Cart, Pages, Stage, and GallerySearch. Looking at the BL2 add-ons for sale, I can only find a few of those. Is the full capability I would need still there?

2) What is the most painless way to upgrade? I understand it's likely I'll have to redo lots of the work from scratch, but what are the ways I could minimize that? I see other threads that suggest the best way is first to upgrade from CE3 to CE4, and then move on to BL2 from there, but I don't have CE4, and don't see any way to get it nowadays. In any event, even if I could, what would be the initial process to upgrade from CE3 to CE4?

These are my initial questions (although I'm sure I'll have more once I get answers to these). The bottom line is that I really liked the site I built with CE3, and the convenience of maintaining the galleries via LR, but obviously I don't see any way to hack CE3's code so it "plays nice" with PHP 7.3. At the moment, I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible to stay in TTG's ecosystem, or whether I need to reconcile myself to a pay-by-the-month service like SquareSpace or Smugmug. Thanks for any information you can give me.

Raven Falls · CE4 Publisher

Daniel Leu wrote:

Can you downgrade the php version you use to something like 5.6?

Thank you! I didn't know JustHost provided a way for individual users to specify which version of PHP to use, but it turns out there's a way you can edit .htaccess from cPanel. Solved the problem right away.

Raven Falls · CE4 Publisher

Hi, Rod. I think I've come up with a new and even more annoying version of this.

Today, when I tried to update my galleries, I got an error message:

Can't update this collection.
Unable to perform action: getSetupForTemplate
Message: Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; Markdown_Parser has a depreciated constructor|#0

...followed by a bunch of filenames and errors far too long to retype here.

However, when I go to the galleries at my website (www.ravenfallsphotography.com) -- and I mean any gallery, not just the one I tried and failed to update, I get the following error message printed across the top of the page:

Unknown error type: [8192] Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; Markdown_Parser has a deprecated constructor
ERROR [8192] Methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP; Markdown_Parser has a deprecated constructor
Unknown error on line 191 in file /home2/jdwmedi1/public_html/ravenfalls/publisher/api/lib/markdown.php, PHP 7.0.33 (Linux)

Needless to say, this makes my site look really unprofessional.

Is there a way to fix this, or am I doomed to have to create an entirely new website from scratch?

Raven Falls · General

And it was all looking so easy -- too easy...

I'm hosted at JustHost. My main domain name is JDW-Media.com. I have my pre-CE3 website set up in public_html/raven_falls, which can be accessed directly at http://www.jdw-media.com/raven_falls, and I have had the domain ravenfallsphotography.com as an assigned domain pointing to that directory.

When I started building my CE3 website, I put it in a folder at the same level, public_html/ravenfalls, and set /ravenfalls/ as the Site Root, which enabled me to directly access it during setup and testing via http://www.jdw-media.com/ravenfalls. I got everything set up right, and was ready to go live, so I went to JustHost's control panel and reassigned ravenfallsphotography.com from public_html/raven_falls to public_html/ravenfalls.

I suppose you can all guess what happened next...

When I browsed to ravenfallsphotography.com, it loaded, but as a text-only version of the website. Checking the various links revealed, probably to no one else's surprise, that they all were referencing http://www.ravenfallsphotography.com/ravenfalls/, which obviously doesn't exist. (I've since reassigned the domain name to point to the old website for the moment.)

Is the only option of fixing this to go back and change all the templates so the Site Root is now http://ravenfallsphotography.com/ (or "/" for simplicity) and then rebuilding, re-uploading, and re-publishing everything? I suppose I can do that, except that I would then have one of two major problems: 1) if I don't reassign the domain first, I would be unable to test my work, as all the links for ravenfallsphotography.com would then still be pointing to non-existent places in public_html/raven_falls instead of the directory in which I was building the new site, or 2) if I did reassign the domain first, it would mean that, during the hours (or more) it took me to re-upload, re-publish, and test the site, any customers would be treated to a jumble of a half-built site, which would look utterly unprofessional.

Are those the only two choices I have? Or is there some other alternative? I noticed this thread: http://community.theturninggate.net/post/2020/#p2020, which almost sounds like I'm experiencing something similar to those working on GoDaddy servers. Would this approach be likely to work in my case? And, if so, since that only refers to AutoIndex (and, thus, needs to change only one .php file), how would I go about making similar modifications to a whole site, including publisher, cart, and search internals? Thanks for any help you can give me on this!

Raven Falls · General

By the way, for those like myself who already have a naming convention (mine was YYYYMMDD_SequenceNumber), and who are leery of switching to a new one for fear of screwing something up while renaming several thousand files and having to correct such a mistake "by hand" on thousands of files, I would strongly recommend the "Search + Replace" plug-in available here: http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/pr … sec=search. Although it is designed to work on metadata rather than filenames, the author gives a workaround for how you can use it for renaming purposes: http://www.beardsworth.co.uk/complex-fi … d-replace/.

In my case, as a backup, I first transferred the original filenames (minus suffixes) to one of the custom data fields (renamed "Filename"), copied that into two additional such fields ("Date" and "Sequence"), then used the search & replace function of the plug-in to trim out the extra data from each of those two, so that the first now holds the YYYYMMDD date and the second the four-digit sequence number for each photo. That way, I can recreate the my original naming convention should something go horribly wrong, and also combine the fields in different ways for a new batch rename job any time I want. (For example, I'm considering devoting another custom field to "Keywords" -- the two or three you recommend -- so that creating a filename for each image according to the advisable scheme will be a simple matter of concatenating the fields together in an IPTC metadata field, and then doing a batch rename from there.) Quick, customizable, and easily reversible...not a bad combination for someone paranoid about screwing up a large LR catalog!

Raven Falls · General

I'm sure they aren't.

One key question (pun not intended): how much weight do search engines give to keywords in filenames as opposed, say, to captions that are displayed within CE3. If, as you say, it is best to restrict oneself to two or three in the filename at most, it would appear that I could be a lot more descriptive and complete with a well-thought-out caption. Are filenames much more heavily weighted in terms of SEO, where it would be wiser to spend more time figuring how best to include keywords there, or should more time be spent figuring out a really good, detailed caption (which I'm going to need to do in most cases anyway)?

Raven Falls · General

Thanks for the link.

As to point 1, I'm really not particularly concerned about using the placement of keywords in titles for sorting purposes, as I can simply use a LR keyword search for the same purpose. My main concern in including keywords at all would be for SEO. (If it wasn't for such matters, I wouldn't put any keywords in the title at all.)

I am still curious to hear what other users' experiences have been as well. From a look at various well-known photographers' websites, it would appear that they generally name files on their website either by the (oftimes fanciful) titles they've given them, or by some completely apparently randomly-generated series of letters and numbers, with no guarantee that the first character will be a letter; neither of which "solution" seems to make any sense at all from an SEO standpoint, or any other form of organization, for that matter.

Raven Falls · General

After reading Matt's article on SEO-compatible file-naming conventions, I realized that I badly needed to do a mass-renaming of my images. (No, I didn't have anything named IMG_0001.jpg, but I did have a system that used only the date and sequence number, meaning no alphanumeric characters to start off, and no keywords at all...not good!)

So, a renaming project is called for. I'm trying to find a balance between making names as useful as possible and the most-efficient solution for renaming somewhere north of 20,000 photographs. My immediate questions:

1) The recommendation in Matt's article is Photographer-identifier_date_keywords_sequence-number. Would there be much difference in usability between that and Photographer-identifier_date_sequence-number_keywords? I ask because it would be much easier to do a batch rename concatenating an identifier with the existing filename, then appending appropriate custom text to the end of that, than having to erase the current sequence numbers and replace each with a keyword-sequence combination of custom text. Also, I sometimes have a number of different subjects over the course of a day, and really don't want to have, in such cases, a whole bunch of keyword combinations, each with a sequence starting all over again with 0001. I get headaches even thinking of trying to keep such a scheme organized.

2) More importantly, how many keywords do you usually use on an image? Matt's first example shows a pattern of country_city plus a few words giving a more-specific location. The thing is, if I wanted to be scrupulous, I could wind up with a filename that would practically include every keyword in my image. For example, if I were to include some shots of wildflower fields in Mount Rainier National Park, I could easily imagine something crazy like "United_States_Washington_Mount_Rainier_National_Park_Paradise_Wildflowers"...and even more if I had a specific type or types of wildflower featured, or some other important quality of the image. Obviously, that could easily result in unbelievably-long filenames -- but, if I were to cut it down to something more manageable, I would think a lot of usefulness for SEO would vanish.

3) When it comes to the photographer-identifier, has anyone found that, say, using their full last name was more useful than simply their initials, or is it pretty much a wash, as long as you start with something distinctive and alphanumeric?

Understand, I'm not asking anyone to give me "The Answer" on how to do this, but I'd just like to hear from some of you what your experiences have been in this regard, and what you find has worked well for you. Thanks!

Raven Falls · General

First of all, thanks to everyone (and particularly Rod and Matthew) for their answers to getting started with CE3.

While getting ready to pull the trigger on CE3, I decided to download the free HTML Gallery plug-ins and play around with them, to give me some idea of working with TTG products. By and large, the results are very nice. However, I'm finding I have a basic problem with LR5 in that, no matter how I customize the settings (text, colors, etc.) for the HTML Gallery in LR's web module, the next time I come back to it, everything has been reset to the default settings, and I have to set them up all over again.

Now, obviously, I doubt that having to redo all the settings each time is the way things were intended to work with that gallery, so, how am I supposed to save the changes to my settings after I make them so that they'll "stick" with the given collection? With previous gallery plug-ins I've used (in LR3), that was never a problem, and I'm a bit surprised to find it so in this situation, so I'm assuming it's something obvious I'm doing wrong. Any idea what that might be?

Raven Falls · General

Thanks -- it sounds to me like Pages would be the way to go for easiest migration, then. Since you say a slideshow and contact form can be set up from within Pages, am I right in concluding that CE3 Stages wouldn't be required (as an addition to Pages, etc.) for my needs?

Raven Falls · General

rod barbee wrote:

But for what you seem to want to do now, the Blog & Galleries bundle should do the trick. And as you're already familiar with Wordpress, you'll probably be pretty comfortable managing your site, creating new pages, and adding content.

Actually, it will be quite a voyage of discovery for me, because I use Wordpress predominantly as an adjunct -- my main site has been built in Dreamweaver with LRG One galleries and the WP (quite simple) journal connected with links. It sounds, from what you've posted, as if a lot more of my site is going to have to be constructed from within Wordpress itself -- or at least that's the implication I get from several replies that state that I can put a slideshow on my site's home page if that home page is within Wordpress. No matter...although I'll obviously need to brush up on WP, if I can build a site from scratch using only DW and older LR plug-ins (not to mention having spent almost two decades coding in C/C++ for a living), learning, or going more in-depth with, another development tool/environment should be relatively trivial. (Of course, the preceding is what is known in the programming world as "famous last words." )

Raven Falls · General

Thanks! What about Stages -- would I need it or not, with wanting to put a slideshow on the front page and include things like an "about me" page and contact form?

Raven Falls · General

Hello, everyone. Obviously, I'm new here. I've had a website up for many years, using a LR plugin set that's incompatible with LR5 (and unlikely to be updated), so I'm looking at migrating my site to CE3.

My question is: which package or set of plugins should I be looking at? My site currently contains galleries with a shopping cart and a WordPress journal. Obviously, I would need the standalone Cart plugin, but I notice that there are two bundles, "Blog & Galleries" and "Web Publishing." At first glance, it would appear that B&G would fit the bill, but, from looking at a comparison of the two bundles, the main difference appears to be that the latter includes CE3 Pages whereas the former has the CE3 Theme for WordPress in its stead. The problem I'm having is that, from the descriptions on the TTG website, it would almost appear that CE3 Pages would be necessary to create just about anything -- but, obviously, since it isn't in the B&G bundle, it must not be as necessary as it would first appear.

So, I have to ask: what specific applications or functions would require the CE3 Pages plugin that wouldn't be covered by the B&G bundle. Are there certain types of pages on a website for which I would have no choice but to get CE3 Pages as well? Or would everything for which one might need CE3 Pages be already covered by other plugins in the B&G bundle?

Finally, I notice the description for CE3 Stages. I would like to have a slideshow on my home page, much as my site currently has now. Would Stages be required for that? In addition, the description mentions "extra pages" and "contact forms" -- if I wanted anything other than galleries and a journal (blog), such as an "about me" page or a page where I could be contacted through a form, would I be needing CE3 Stages as well?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can give me.

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 Re: Backlight 2 Support » Another CE3 refugee seeking help... » 2019-10-12 07:36:44

#2 Backlight 2 Support » Another CE3 refugee seeking help... » 2019-10-11 11:54:20

#3 Re: CE4 Publisher » Unable to upload from CE4 Publisher in LR Cassic CC » 2019-01-11 17:14:17

#4 Re: CE4 Publisher » Unable to upload from CE4 Publisher in LR Cassic CC » 2019-01-11 14:30:39

#5 General » Subdomain issues are breaking my new site » 2014-04-18 07:02:53

#6 Re: General » Your experiences with file-naming? » 2014-04-07 13:53:16

#7 Re: General » Your experiences with file-naming? » 2014-04-07 07:58:07

#8 Re: General » Your experiences with file-naming? » 2014-04-04 23:48:50

#9 General » Your experiences with file-naming? » 2014-04-04 17:13:33

#10 General » Quick (and possibly dumb) question about the HTML Gallery 1.0.2 » 2014-01-15 18:23:51

#11 Re: General » Getting started » 2014-01-09 15:03:55

#12 Re: General » Getting started » 2014-01-09 11:03:58

#13 Re: General » Getting started » 2014-01-09 05:26:08

#14 General » Getting started » 2014-01-08 18:33:55

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