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Thanks for this; I had forgotten about the search title field. Unfortunately I am not knowledgeable enough to play with css at the moment but one day....
In the meanwhile I think I must try disabling the "Share CE4 resources" box in the gallery template. I enabled that a few days ago and perhaps that is at the root of the problem. I can already begin to see some change for the better in styling with it disabled (for now, until I know how to use it; and yes, I know Matt did warn it was only for advanced users...).
I am very impressed with your own search page!
Whoops! I have tried this now with all possible variations.
1. Copy and paste the Page Copy under Content/Description in the gallery template into the sidebar. Two columns, right, 8/12. The checkbox "Display on page" I left enabled as before. Result: block and sidebar show as desired in the page preview in LR.
2. Delete the text from the Page Copy and leave the sidebar copy in place. Result: both block and sidebar disappear, leaving a blank space under the navigation bar and breadcrumbs in the page preview. The sidebar text does, however, show up online when the template has been uploaded; only the LR preview is incorrect.
3. By way of test, insert sample text "xx" back into Page Copy. Display in page preview is back as expected with sidebar copy and "xx" above the grid.
4. On clicking the "Search" button, the sidebar comes up left and the search field right, as desired. However, when the results come in, half of the the sidebar content spills out left of the mantle, far to the left of the navigation bar etc and in fact, on one of my pc's, half off-screen. The sidebar content is below left of the breadcrumb search results and left above the grid. All my page-widths and so on are still at the default 1140px. The sample "xx" text has again disappeared entirely and must have been overruled by Publisher somehow, being replaced by a blank page copy, but how, I wonder? I use Pages and Stage but can't think of a link between albums or albums sets (and their associated "replace page copy" permissions) and my search template which I only use for the search button.
So I fear I am not there yet. The thing is that search used to work for me with my info text in the normal block and not in a sidebar. That is the mystery.
Searching the community forum for instances of "Search" is not easy and I haven't found what I was looking for, so here goes. Sorry for this question at a time the forum is extra busy with the updates.
I have Publisher search installed and running and it works. Today I installed updates TTG-BE-203, Gallery 614a and Publisher 220b. My problem has existed for a few days and has not altered with these updates, but that does not surprise me as I am sure I have made some mistake in a template or wherever a few days ago, because it has worked before.
I added some text to the block of a gallery template, explaining how to search and asking people to wait 20 seconds etc. This template I exported to ttg-be/templates/gallery/Publisher-search-template. I also selected this template in the ttg-be admin. When the search is executed and also when results come in, the block is empty and only the "Search" button, or the results, are there. But a right-click to see the page source shows the template being used correctly on martinsharrott.com/search. The text I wrote is there when I view the template in ttg-be in a text editor. What have I done wrong somewhere in Publisher to overrule this block text and replace it by nothing? I allow Publisher to replace template page copy generally but I am not aware that I can set this anywhere for the search function.
Any hint in the right direction will be appreciated.
I don't believe so. There is enough on the Adobe site about this bug which they (Adobe) do not appear to have been able to address since it first emerged with the release of (I believe) version 5.5. If it occurs again I will post the relevant Adobe link, which shows when "Adobe Technote" is clicked, here.
Well, about half an hour after I posted the menu problem, suddenly LR allowed me to edit the album set without protest, so the urgency has now receded. It will however not surprise me if the bug occurs again before long.
I couldn't find references to this LR bug in the forum but if there is anything useful, please point me in the right direction.
I have been receiving a LR message which appears to be a recognized, but unsolved, LR bug, even in 5.7. One is working happily when the following window pops up:
"Lightroom has encountered a problem with its menus. Some menu commands will not work until Lightroom has been restarted. See Adobe Technote - Restart Lightroom - Continue"
This has previously been solved by restarting as suggested; the Continue option results in the pop-up again. On the Adobe forum it is said to be related to having a large number of develop presets. Well, I have none to speak of so that cannot be relevant.
My immediate problem is that I am unable to edit a critical album set template, the main autoindex in my galleries folder. Even after a LR restart, a pc reboot, clearing the cache, optimizing the catalog, running checkdisk etc etc, this message pops up as soon as I try to edit the Base Settings in the album set.
Have others encountered this and does anyone know a workaround to enable editing of the album set?
Thank you, Rod; I have checked the file names just to be sure and there are no strange characters there. Ben has suggested something and I have mailed him an error log which I located and which I believe will point us in the right direction when he has looked at it.
I have successfully published many albums and album sets to both my /galleries/ folder and to a /clients/ folder, all of which work fine.
Until yesterday, that is, when I published a gallery which is entirely similar to other galleries except for different images, and after upload had completed I received a dreaded white Firefox screen with the message:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Whatever I tried with republishing made no difference and this gallery provoked the same response when trying to view it in a browser. All other galleries were, and are, working normally when viewed in Firefox. In the end I (optimistically, to avoid having to upload so many images again) deleted the album in Publisher and "let LR forget about it", hoping to to be able to publish over it, which of course did not work. I then manually removed all references to the album, its photos, keywords etc from master.sq3 and published again. The publishing process, which I first tried with 10 images, looking at them in a browser, then 100 images, checking again, and finally the rest of the album, completed in LR without any errors. I heaved a sigh of relief. Until I tried to view the gallery online in a browser this evening and read exactly the same server error message.
I had checked the 23MB publisher log for yesterday, after the offending problem, and there was no instance of words such as "fail"or "error" in this log. I am therefore convinced that publishing was fine. Where could I start to sort it out? Here is the offending gallery: http://martinsharrott.com/galleries/2013-03-16Alkmaar/
Thanks for any suggestions.
That's brilliant, Ben: good news about back-calculation of tax. And as for pricing schemes, well, I am sure you have more pressing matters on your to-do list. I managed for years without the cart, but having tried it, I have found it to be a very useful administrative tool (even without online payments) for mailing and confirming orders to me and to the client. Its order history is also excellent.
Please don't think I underestimate the time and effort that goes into such programming. What I meant by my remark was that my apparently innocent "little" question would need such a rigorous re-organisation of folder structures to solve it; clearly the better solution is that Moses goes to the mountain, i.e. I find a work-around within CE4 to service those particular clients. CE4 is much too good a package to give up. Thanks again!
Thank you both for these practical, if at first sight somewhat heavy-handed, suggestions. By "heavy-handed", I mean that it seems a rather drastic solution to the little question of how not to set a minimum order level for certain (in my case very regular and faithful) clients. On the other hand I need to maintain a minimum order level for one-off consumer clients, otherwise they will happily order one 4x6"print today, another one tomorrow, etc.
I can see that this second instance of ttg-be could be the solution, although I cannot imagine that I am the only one who has differing client requirements. The galleries are already so wonderfully flexible and perhaps a future version of CE4 could offer a few more flexible options in its cart section? Such options might include different shipping costs for different clients, different minimum order levels and probably more I could come up with. I believe another user had mentioned a requirement for a different tax method; I too would certainly welcome extra tax flexibility in a future release so that purchasers can opt to see prices exclusive or inclusive of sales (or, here in Europe, "value added") tax. For instance, I am required by law to quote private individuals a price inclusive of tax: say, 10.00 per photo. But my charges to businesses and government bodies, for instance, are based on offers and quotations exclusive of sales tax at 21%, so those clients would be charged 10.00 plus 21% = 12.10 with the final amount ideally needing to be split, visibly, on their order confirmation as it will be later, on my invoice. Shipping charges and any other charges would need to be (able to be) quoted exclusive of tax too.
It just occurs to me that Ben's proposed solution might present me with a problem: there will be galleries that I would like all clients to have access to. Suppose, for instance, I have a gallery of local scenes which I want private consumers to have access to (for a canvas print on their wall) but which also will be interesting to local government or to a business, for a brochure or website. The one client may be charged 100.00 for private use; the other 200.00 for business use. This gallery may consist of hundreds, if not thousands, of stock images. It would be difficult to maintain the same gallery in set-one/galleries/ and in set-two/galleries/, I fear.
However, the very opportunity to discuss this sort of thing in this forum is great, and TTG has always been an ongoing project. I look forward to all new updates, major or minor, as things evolve.
I am implementing different pricing schemes. Say that one is for consumers and I am introducing a new one for certain business clients.
In this business scheme I have one item available: a digital download. This is priced at 0.00, because I invoice the client (in this case) on a monthly basis later, and the cart I see as a client-friendly way of choosing an image out of a gallery (we'll leave the client response gallery question for the time being for what it is, as I am awaiting a new release). The client chooses the image and orders it like any consumer; I get the order and the client gets the automatic confirmation of his order, and I upload the desired hi-res image to my server so the client can download it. Without charge until I invoice at a later date for this and other images, all in one go, but not too often, as the client doesn't want that.
But then the minimum order level in my other pricing scheme kicks in and warns the client that I have a minimum allowed order of 50.00 whilst his order costs 0.00. When I try to edit cart settings, I can see no mention of which pricing scheme I am editing, or whether I am editing all schemes at once. I am afraid of messing up what took quite a while to get to work as I want them.
Or is this a case where I should use "Edit Cart Settings" and create a new Cart ID under "Miscellaneous"? If I do that, will the existing settings in the default ttg_cart_01 remain unaltered and will I then be offered the choice of which cart I wish to edit whilst all other carts are safe from unwanted edits?
Sorry but I am at a loss to know what is the best way to have completely different prices, shipping, minimums etc for different sorts of clients who need treating in different ways.
For what it's worth, Marty, as a new to CE4 user I had a problem which sounds just the same as you had when I could not get the cart to work, and this was solved as soon as I eliminated the "www" from all templates. The moment I restricted URLs to http://mydomain.com without the www, everything worked fine together.
Here is my URL where Search is implemented: http://www.martinsharrott.com (or any gallery)
Am I right in thinking the search function within publisher galleries is currently not working at all? When I search for a known keyword or caption or even part of a filename, the system hangs for a minute or more and then returns a white screen. I remember reading about some problems which were going to be helped. Is there a workaround to get it working a bit?
All my pages have a search navigation tab linking to search/ and I have created the search directory and copied the files to it as required. The strange thing is that it did work a couple of weeks ago when I first implemented search in a test phase.
That's sorted it out. Thank you!
Merry Christmas to all!
Having managed to use Stage for a flip gallery on my home page www.martinsharrott.com, I was pleased to have everything working at last, except for a tiny detail.
The flip presentation generates a text bottom left "Use [arrows] to navigate etc" and also up and down "angles" on the right hand side.
When a user first loads the home page, the text appears but the arrows and angles are in the form of little square boxes with illegible letters, perhaps some ALT text. I have tried four different computers and Firefox, IE and Android, and they are all the same.
When one clicks on the "Enter" box to enter my Galleries page, and then returns to the home page by clicking on the "home" tab, lo and behold, the arrows and angles are there now. This happens every time. The user's cache plays no role in this as I have cleared caches many times and it is always the first load that is a problem. It looks like the arrow images are missing at first on my server. Where should I look to remedy the problem?
Thank you, Rod and Ben, for your excellent and clear advice. I appreciate the "golden rule" tip!
Having mailed my host provider about the register_globals setting which prevented me logging in, they turned it off and showed me how to do that sort of thing myself in the "OPS" part of my host's settings. It has enabled me to access the phpLIte admin and I can now see all the album tables you refer to. I will study them and sort it out.
First-class help from you both. Thanks so much.
Thank you, Rod, for these two answers. I am starting to feel better already.
I shall now tackle the database with confidence! Being able to move the albums around was just as I expected, namely as in the rest of LR and TTG; it would not work for me yesterday but hopefully once I have sorted my yesterday's chaos, it will.
Your suggestion of mailing Ben was a good one but that would be a last resort. My ttg.log entries for yesterday alone come to 23MB... which I could not possibly burden him with, but it has given me insight into where the system stumbled over id numbers; there are a couple of entries "failed to open stream: no such file or directory.....gallery.xml" so that must have been when I had deleted the xml file just before LR tried to delete it for me in the queue. In fact, in those 23MB, the letters "fail" occur only those two times so this must have been the trouble.
I don't know in which order I deleted albums. Quite possibly using FTP first since I was studying the output to the server frequently and when I saw it was wrong on the server I expect I deleted it straightaway, but virtually simultaneously using Publisher in LR. Whatever the order was that I did it in, it was the wrong one. As I wrote above, not being aware that an upload to the server was ongoing in the background even after I had cancelled the proces(ses) using the red cross in the LR progress bar, things went from bad to worse.
I would not know where to start editing the database. If it is editable in a text editor you could give me an indication such as "see if you can do this and this; look for this entry in file xxxxx.xxx and delete it" or whatever. If I am not sure what to do, I shall leave it alone.
Other galleries exported and/or published appear to be working normally; I just want to make sure the database is as it should be so that I can start creating some new album sets and albums.
By the way, is there any way to achieve the following, namely to move album 5 out of the set so that it is a stand-alone album next to 1, 2, 3 etc? I could not achieve that yesterday, although that might have been due to the mixed-up database by that time.
Publisher instance 1
album1
album2
album3
album set 1:
- album4
- album5
album6
album7
Thanks for all assistance!
I forgot to mention that when I tried to create new albums in LR yesterday I was often told it was impossible as such an album existed already (which was not the case) and several unfamiliar-looking error messages fill of technical jargon were splashed up over the LR window. There was no indication whether these messages came from LR or from TTG
Hopefully Ben or Rod can help me on this one. Now getting accustomed to Publisher to produce albums instead of exporting galleries, I am finding that getting this up and running is anything but a smooth operation. The principles are clear and technically most things work fine.
However, my experience with the album management in LR is not very positive as yet.
Having made album1 as I want it, I hoped to be able to copy album1 and edit a few details to save it as album2 and fill it with different images, just as one can with a gallery template. Not so. I cannot find a way to duplicate an album, not even (ever the optimist) being able to locate it in Windows Explorer to edit it as a text file. So one ends up having to complete the 3 pages of albums details all over again. Or is there a way after all?
Having made (and published) four albums under my one publishing instance, I then created an album set and two albums within it. LR starts publishing the structure immediately on the host's server and I start filling these two albums with images. I start to publish the images. But then , you know how it is, you suddenly notice you have made a mistake with a date or spelling, and you correct it in LR. You see folders appearing on the server with wrong dates so you delete them in order to start again. In the meanwhile you make other alterations to your album. Etc etc. UNAWARE that something is going on in the background all the time in some spooler or whatever and images are still uploading or being processed even though the LR progress bar is not always present. Files continue to be uploaded to the server long after you think it must have finished. So the result is a complete jumble and even after deleting albums plus album set and the offending folders from the server, and republishing the album, the contents of the grid, when viewed online, are all mixed up. Some thumbnails occur twice and in the wrong order. I fear some database must be corrupted. But if this happens on my first day, I cannot afford to have it happening twice. The aftermath was even worse, as having altered the default cart in the album settings (I saw I had not altered it to my own pricing scheme) and republishing four galleries, without the photos, simultaneously as I went to bed, this morning the pc had frozen with 6GB (or 89%) memory use by LR. needless to say it refused to budge until I turned it off at the switch. I cannot help feeling this just should not happen.
The intention behind Publisher as against gallery exports, is one of simplicity and speed. I can understand the ease of altering things and leaving images intact or adding a couple to a gallery. But if LR is not capable of coping reliably with a queue, what is actually achieved? Publishing an album takes exactly the same time as exporting a gallery, in my experience, doing an average of 300 images an hour without any hi-res exports. My connection speeds are a fast 90Mbit/s down; 9Mbit/s up.
Another strange thing: if I open my publisher instance (I have only created one – CE4 publisher mpvs v1 - so far) then I see "LR Publishing Manager" and a list of services left: Hard Drive etc etc "TTG CE4 Publisher (not saved)". If I click on the SAVE button bottom right, this "(not saved)" remains in force and I am told I have changed the settings for this publish connection (which I haven't) and am asked if I want to republish all the xxxx photos or not. Do you know why I keep getting "(not saved)" in the LR Publishing Manager window"?
In the meanwhile I have a pile of paper printed from the docs and forum discussions on albums and album sets etc and I believe I have read at least most of the last few months' (very helpful) community correspondence, alas to no avail in this case. Studying (only) yesterday's ttg log on my server was a non-starter; it had amounted to a staggering 45MB!
So, in conclusion, I can get the principle of publishing to work, but the practice to date has been rather frustrating. No doubt it will get sorted out, but like most people, I feel awkward having to ask for assistance.
Thank goodness it's nothing I had done. Thanks, Ben.
Thanks Matt and Rod for your time, conclusions, and advice on this technical matter unrelated to TTG but to LR which is not very good with managing video memory, at least in my computer. As advised, I am now learning to use Publisher. My dilemma has been: Publisher sounds as if it could be interesting or useful to me but what can it do for me that my existing modules do not deliver? I think I may not be the only user who asks himself that question. Once one gets into the software things start to become clear, and those more familiar with (for instance) Publisher might consider just a little more explanation in the initial documentation to new (potential) users as to what this module actually can do and could mean for him/her, how it could save time and what it might be better than other modules at doing. This probably sounds obvious, but I believe it would be of assistance to many.
As suggested by Rod (in the Gallery forum) I am experimenting with getting acquainted with Publisher for the first time. Even as an experienced CE user I had delayed this as it was far from clear to me what Publisher actually does, compared with the other modules. Only by experimenting am I learning the answer to that question.
However, curious as I am to see if anything strange showed up studying the log in ttg-be/publisher, I came across this strange html in the text of the URL of an image:
quote (extract)
[09-Dec-2014 07:00:18] TRACE: returning: {"status":"success","asset":{"id":"50183_95552","album_id":"50183","filename":"2014_01_11--08_14_58-m4192160.jpg","title":"2014_01_11--08_14_58-m4192160.jpg","url":"http:\/\/martinsharrott.com\/galleries\/test-album-2014-01-11-01-v1\/","capture_time":"2014-01-11 08:14:57","sequence":"0","latitude":"","longitude":"","is_complete":"yes","created":"2014-12-09 07:00:12","modified":"2014-12-09 07:00:15"},"photoId":"50183_95552"}
unquote
Where could this repeated backslash - slash come from? Have I done something wrong? Does it matter? The images pages generated online seem to work normally.