Community @ The Turning Gate

Well, as it turns out...it looks like Matt and Ben's database update scripts are far more clever than I am!

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Updating Backlight Publisher from version 3.2.0 to 3.2.2
Backing up databases...
Backed up master.sq3
Upgrading to version 3.2.1...
Update to 3.2.1 completed
Upgrading to version 3.2.2...
Updating settings table
Update to 3.2.2 completed

Click here to continue.

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And it probably would have helped reduce the anxiety a bit had I read this rather important line from the README...

=== To update from Backlight+Pages 1.2.0 or 1.2.1 to Backlight+Pages 1.2.2: ====

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Relatively painless upgrades (with the exception of self-inflicted stupidity such as the above!) is yet another reason to be happy with life in Backlight.   And on a personal level...I'm utterly thrilled to finally know what in the hell an okapi and a pangolin is!  That's another one off the bucket list...

Now the fun really begins...converting the templates to their pangolin counterparts and drooling over the new and clever things I can do with them! 

"This is one of the frustrating things about Wordpress ... you have thousands of people writing plugins, sometimes coding rather irresponsibly, in ways that don't mesh with code written by other people ..."

Cowboy coding and not even trying to investigate and implement best practices and standards is the bane of any professional programmer's existence...and I'll be the first to admit I've been guilty of it myself from time to time, especially when it comes to the UI which as a back-end programmer has always been my weakest skill.  In fact, one of the higher-priority things on my plate for a pro-bono database application I've written over the past 3-4 years is to finally wrangle all of the ad-hoc styling into a real stylesheet.

In over 20 years of driving the keyboard, I've learnt it's not enough to merely accomplish the task at hand...any code monkey with "XXX Language for Dummies" can write code that is worse than any virus can do that.

The mark of a true programming artisan is one who takes pride in the designing and crafting of elegant code that works well and plays well with others and incorporates industry best practices.   And then when that is done, they test it thoroughly and document it well before releasing it to the wild.

Of course, there are times where even the most careful programmer has to deal with the fact that customer demands and the odd "execrement happens" are going to require taking extraordinary measures and occasionally that means it's you're Hawkeye Pierce doing some meatball surgery on the code quickly to get the customer running again.

It's what happens afterward that separates the amateur poseurs from the professionals. 

Professionals will take the time after the immediate crisis is sorted to go back and clean up the hacks (or document them if they've got to stay) and update the test suite to test these new test cases.  Professionals will go back and refactor code to make it easier to reuse and prune out the dead code.  Professionals are constantly keeping up with the moving target that is the industry standards and new technologies that can be brought to bear on a problem.  All of which doesn't necessarily show up in the budget or the schedule but still need to be done which is why a professional programmer's week is rarely only 40 hours...we're often doing these things on our own time and dime because whilst management will rarely see the value in these activities...you do when you have to debug and support that code two years down the road!

But most importantly, a true professional programmer is at their heart a creative individual and an artist which is something they have as much of a passion for as they do reading the latest technical journals or playing with the newest technology.  Invariably the best programmers I've ever recommended for hire were the ones who were photographers or poets or writers or painters...you've got to have a creative mind to truly allow yourself to see all of the possible solutions to a problem...some of which may not be at all obvious to the casual observer.

There are plenty of industries where "Ratatouille" Chef Auguste Gusteau's  adage that "anyone can cook!" works well...but professional programming ain't one of them! 

My mother is totally colour blind...everything is literally shades of grey.

She's learnt to recognise particular hues of grey as certain colours (for example, on a stoplight) but I'll never forget when I discovered this was when I proudly brought home a maroon-coloured sports car and being so proud of the car's colour only to have her ask me what was so impressive about a grey car!

Failing that, she'll ask what colour something is and then carry on.

I thought I had her with the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle from hell which was a fractal-looking thing with all sorts of colours in play.  She had it completely put together in less than a day...her colour blindness allowed her to look past the glaring colour and see the patterns which made it trivial.  She took great delight in presenting me with that puzzle in a frame and patting me on the head with "better luck next time!"

Having thought through pricing schemes recently (and I'm playing with the cart as we speak!), I came to the conclusion that for me it'd be far easier and cleaner to just reflect any costs of production and post-processing the photograph in the item's price itself.

The only exception would be photographs in which I'd offer explicit retouching for an additional charge.  I very rarely touch the photos as they're generally what I want them to look like coming out of the camera but I've had one recent client whose actress daughter had a visible microphone peeking out beneath her hair she's wanting me to eliminate with Photoshop.  Things like this where it'll take me significant time above and beyond applying some enhancements and presets in Lightroom are those I'd think a separate fee are appropriate.  What I would envision this would be two prices in the scheme in the cart...one without retouching and a higher price with retouching.

Well, thanks to the efforts of Matthew and Ben (and certainly you for your tutorials that have saved me literally hours of reinventing the wheel!)...there's a darned good incentive to keep messing about with Backlight.  The only real problem I have is that there are so many wonderfully done Backlight sites that make it difficult to decide which way I want to go with mine! 

Speaking of which, one of the annual tasks I really tended to dread on sunfox.com was creating placeholder content for the new year's worth of photos.  Prior to CE4 and Backlight, this was copying and pasting HTML templates and CSS files, updating all of the templates with the new copyright, and doing a lot of content housekeeping under the covers (and praying I didn't miss something in the process!).  This was usually a 2-3 hour job and painful at best...

I just built the 2017 placeholders for four of the five sections of sunfox.com in about 20 minutes in Backlight Admin.

All I had to do was update the menu set for each section to point at the new album set for 2017 created by Publisher (don't have anything in it yet...got to work through the backlog!) and update the archive page to point to the old year's Publisher gallery, grab one thumbnail and upload it, and then add a new DIV for 2017 with the thumbnail filename and fix the location of the "row" CSS styles on the HTML that was built using the responsive grid framework.

And once I was done fiddling with each section, it was instantly available in production.

This would be reason #1723 that I have absolutely no desire to ever go back to hand-rolling HTML and exporting galleries out of the Web Module because the Backlight way is *WAY MORE AWESOME*!

Reason #1724 would be having a lot more time stroll down memory lane to select the images for the full-screen presentation for each section...

I really like the square images in the slideshow.

Not only are the images beautiful but also one could almost hear the slide projector clicking as each image transitioned.  The rest of the site is nice and clean and really easy to navigate!

C'est vraiment magnifique! 

All metadata items selected ON visually verified in the CRG configuration UI and also in the JSON for the exported template (the relevant bits are reproduced below):

"crg.metadata.meta01.title":"Date\/Time","crg.metadata.meta01.value":"{DD} {Mon} {YYYY} {HH}:{MIN}:{SS}",
"crg.metadata.meta02.title":"Lens","crg.metadata.meta02.value":"{Lens}",
"crg.metadata.meta03.title":"Shutter speed \/  Aperture","crg.metadata.meta03.value":"{ShutterSpeed} at {Aperture}",
"crg.metadata.meta04.title":"ISO Speed Rating","crg.metadata.meta04.value":"{ISO}",
"crg.metadata.meta05.title":"Exposure Bias","crg.metadata.meta05.value":"{ExposureBias}",
"crg.metadata.meta06.title":"Flash","crg.metadata.meta06.value":"{Flash}"

"crg.select":"on",
"crg.feedback":"on",
"crg.metadata.meta01":"on",
"crg.metadata.meta02":"on",
"crg.metadata.meta03":"on",
"crg.metadata.meta04":"on",
"crg.metadata.meta05":"on",
"crg.metadata.meta06":"on"

Digging into the code in file jquery.ttgcrg-backlight.js, I found this loop at line 224 that renders the metadata deflist items in the modal popup:

		for (count = 1; count < 5; count++) {
			var title = $(img).attr('data-metadata-title-' + count);
			var value = $(img).attr('data-metadata-value-' + count);

			if (title != undefined && value != undefined) {
				$('div.crg-metadata').append('<dl><dt>' + title + '</dt><dd>' + value + '</dd></dl>');
			}
		}

That loop will terminate after four iterations...when the 5 is changed to a 7, all six of the available metadata items appear in the modal popup if they're turned on in the template.  I tested this by quickly patching that file on my site and it seems to work with no knock-on ill effects.

I ended up disabling all of the metadata items one-by-one until none of them was displayed on the popup...still getting the same result when fiddling with the ratings stars.

Error message in console when hovering over a star:

TypeError: $(...).prevAll(...).andSelf is not a function[Learn More]  test-album:586:12

Error message in console when clicking on a star:

TypeError: $(...).prevAll(...).andSelf is not a function[Learn More]  test-album:604:5

Error message in console on mouse leaving the star:

TypeError: $(...).prevAll(...).andSelf is not a function[Learn More]  test-album:591:6

Those line numbers are roughly two script invocations to resource.php for scaffolding and scripts, respectively...I popped those URLs into the browser window and the server served up the scripts.

I'm going to re-enable the metadata items and restore the template to it's former state for any additional debugging you might need.

For the time being, I've killed the masthead image on all of the full-screen slideshow page templates and cleared the cache.  Firefox took a bit more convincing (had to hit reload twice on most of them) but Chrome seemed to pick up the changes straightaway.  The masthead images were nice but I'm more interested in the slideshow kicking off consistently...

I had noticed the server I'm on having occasional goofy moments ever since Lunarpages rebuilt it about a year or so ago but hadn't really had the time until now to try to debug what was going on.  That particular site is 50GB of images with five generations of HTML templates since it went live in 2003 so it's not the easiest thing to just pick up and move.

That was the primary reason for how I designed the Backlight templates in play on sunfox.com...I didn't wish to try to completely rebuild the whole site but rather get Backlight to take over from CE4 (which is the 2015 content) and the previous pages/galleries.  I might revisit the idea of doing a full rebuild if Google would ever get off their duffs and finish the build out of Fiber here in Raleigh but for now I'm very happy with Backlight ruling the roost and pointing at the old galleries even if it's not necessarily the most pretty site out there (dammit Jim...I'm a database weenie, not a web designer! 

I just created a new hosting account over at Bluehost and will be migrating the Red Vixen Studios site from it's current location.  As I've happily gone all-in on Backlight and I'm looking forward to integrating CRG and Cart for online sales, that's the one site that will be really critical to ensure that the hosting is in ordnung!