CE4 Beginners guide

thomasl · 2014-10-03 22:48:28

Hello,
I am joining the "beginners" community too.
I was trying to read through the documentation, however, I have some issues with understanding some of the basic concepts I guess.
Following the tutorial documents, I managed to get the system up once, meaning that I could create a basic site with Pages. I then created a gallery template and finally managed to publish 2 albums using the publisher.
But now I still have lots of questions and also several problems:

1. The "Setup a Publisher Instance" document says:

With CE4 Publisher installed, you now need to setup an “instance” of the publisher for each location to which you wish to publish galleries, i.e. for each target location. A target location may be any of the following:
If using CE4 Pages, the target folder will typically be the /galleries folder.
If using CE4 Auto Index, you may use any auto index folder as your target.
If using neither CE4 Pages nor CE4 Auto Index, you may create an empty folder to use as target.

Does this mean I may either use CE4 Pages or CE4 Auto Index? I understood, that pages is for the basic site, whereas AutoIndex assembles an index page of my galleries, that I am going to upload with publisher. Is there some structured information about how all the different CE4 components work together? I am missing this.

2. I ran into a lot of trouble initially, since my web provider could not enable me sqlite, etc (would be nice to have a prerequisites document somewhere, so to read it before buying the package) . So I had no other choice that to look for a different web server. I have changed this now. However, when in the library tab in LR5 and selected either of the two publisher selections, I see in the upper right area of the window, just before the "Publish" button links to 2 different sites. Both are wrong and I do not know how to set these correctly. I was looking up the settings in the "Lightroom Publishing Manager" dialog box, and the API URL is set to the correct system. What stands API for in this context? And API key?

3. When hitting the "Publish" button just mentioned, I receive a large "Warning" box with an error message "An internal error has occurred: "JSON.lua:458 ...". So I am stuck with using publisher for the moment.

4. Probably a basic usage question: in LR5 on the right panel of the Web modul, I can select the "Layout Style". So CE4 uses these as accessing diffent modules, not layouts, right? I see that I use the Pages, Viewport Sizer and Gallery for the relative purposes. However, when do I select Auto Index? This is probably still related to the fact, that I do not understand the CE4 architecture.

5. After trials and obviously errors i would like to make sure, that the folder structure on the webserver is ok. What would be the folder structure for a site to be manages with Pages, Publisher, Gallery, Auto Index starting from the www-root folder?

6. I have installed ttg-be. It works some how, at least user/password protection for galleries does work, Also the mail on the contact page does work fine. However, Search does not work. I can enter a search string in the search page, but it will not find anything. I tried with album names, image titles and captions. What do I need to check?

Thanks for any help with the topics above.
Thomas

rod barbee · 2014-10-03 23:14:40

Does this mean I may either use CE4 Pages or CE4 Auto Index? I understood, that pages is for the basic site, whereas AutoIndex assembles an index page of my galleries, that I am going to upload with publisher. Is there some structured information about how all the different CE4 components work together? I am missing this.

Yes. You can target the galleries/ folder from Pages with one Publisher instance. You can target an autoindex folder with another instance of Publisher. Many users do this so they can manage their main galleries and, say, Client galleries separately.

There's not one structure as to how all the components fit together. This is because you can put them together in many different ways. In general, use CE4 Gallery and CE4 Stage to present images (and videos through Stage). Use Pages to create the structure of a site. Use Autoindex to create additional indexes or even just general usage pages. (Stage also makes a great general usage page).
Gallery and Stage are used to create Album templates for use with Publisher. Autoindex is used to create Album Set templates for use with Publisher.

4. Probably a basic usage question: in LR5 on the right panel of the Web modul, I can select the "Layout Style". So CE4 uses these as accessing diffent modules, not layouts, right? I see that I use the Pages, Viewport Sizer and Gallery for the relative purposes. However, when do I select Auto Index? This is probably still related to the fact, that I do not understand the CE4 architecture.

You access the web engines from here. You can save your design by using the Template Browser in the left hand panel of Lightroom's Web Module.
Use Autoindex to create Album Set templates or stand alone indexes.

5. After trials and obviously errors i would like to make sure, that the folder structure on the webserver is ok. What would be the folder structure for a site to be manages with Pages, Publisher, Gallery, Auto Index starting from the www-root folder?

see the folder screen capture here: http://ce4.theturninggate.net/docs/doku … _ce4_pages
The contents of the exported Pages folder goes in the root of your site.
The TTG_BE/ folder also goes in the root of the site. The publisher/ folder goes inside ttg-be/
http://ce4.theturninggate.net/docs/doku … tion_setup
http://ce4.theturninggate.net/docs/doku … stallation

for the rest of your questions, they'll probably get answered more quickly if you can separate them and put them under the relevant forum topic. Since most are Publisher related, post them there. That way Ben will be sure to see them.

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2014-10-03 22:48:28

CE4 Beginners guide

#2 2014-10-03 23:14:40

Re: CE4 Beginners guide

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