Gallery Builder Print

Gallery Builder

Step 1) FTP to your server and located your cms_admin/smarty folder. Inside the smarty folder for each site is a folder named gallerybuilder which contains your gallery templates. Using the included default templates as a guide you will need to edit the HTML of your own template files to include the code from the photos and/or videos smarty files. You’ll need to save your template using the extension .tpl

Inside the gallerybuilder folder you will notice that there are 2 folders named photos and videos. These contain the image files for each template. The images folder must be named the same as the template so photos.tpl has a folder named photos. A template named blue_15pics.tpl would have a folder named /blue_15pics

Step 2) Login to your cms admin panel. Click Galleries on the top navigation bar (if this icon is not present, click Toolbar Configuration on the left side navigation menu and add the icon). Click Add a New Template. Here you will assign and name and specify settings for the template including the location and thumbnail sizes for each corresponding image (thumbnail or video screen-cap) in the template. You can also upload a screenshot of the gallery for easy identification and selection by administrators and/or affiliates.

Step 3) On the main gallery builder page, at the top is a form field titled Add a New Collection. Enter a name for the collection and click the Add button. A collection is a collection of content sets to be used for generating 1 or more galleries

Step 4) Once you have added a collection click Manage Content next to the collection name. Here you will select the content sets you want to include in your collection. When you check a box for a content set you’ll see that it appears on the right side of the page just below a menu of options. The fields in the menu are uses to specify the number of photos to pull from the set(2) for the collection. If you specify 30 for example, the system will choose 30 random images from the photo set and use them to load your templates. Depending how many templates you have and how many times you want to use the same set in galleries, you will want to choose a large enough number of photos to avoid reuse of the same photo too many times between the different templates. This ensures that your affiliates will not import a list of duplicate galleries and each gallery will be unique.

You can do the same for number of clips.

If creating movie galleries you must specify the clip length in seconds e.g. 60, 120, 180, etc. Each clip will be cut to this length.

By default the clips are cut in order. This means the clip cutting begins at the beginning of the source file and progresses towards the end. The result here is a vide o gallery with clips that are in order from beginning to end. Selecting random from the dropdown will create a gallery of random clips from different parts of the scene.

If you want to set intervals you may specify the start point for clips and/or the length of time between each clip’s start point. This is useful if you plan to take screencaps manually or if you want to bypass the intro portion of a scene and only capture clips containing action.

Once you have added the sets you want to include in this collection, click the Save Collection button on the right side menu.

Step 5) Return to the main gallery builder page. Check the box next to the collection you want to use to build galleries and click the Build Selected Pages button.

Here you have options for the collection. This will build a series of galleries using different templates and different content depending on the selections you make.

Path to store files is where the files will be generated. This is an absolute path and you may edit it as needed.

Many of the fields are self-explanatory.

Limit Number of Templates Used Per Collection

This determine how the content is split among different templates to create unique galleries. The number specified here will be the number of times a specific collection of photos from 1 content set can be used. If you do not want the content used on more than 1 template, select 1 here. If you don’t want the system to load multiple templates with the same content you will want to set this to 1. The lower the number, the more exclusivity the content will have and you will not end up with duplicate galleries across different design templates.

Multiplier

This specifies the amount of different galleries to create from the same content set. If you specified to use 100 photos per set for the collection in step 4 above and specify 5 in the Multiplier field, the system will take 100 photos from a set and randomize them among 5 different galleries using the same or different templates if you so choose.

Only check for errors (do not batch)

This runs a pre-check to make sure that the template files are free of any coding errors that would prevent the gallery building from successfully creating galleries. If this box is checked and you select a template and hit submit, the bar next to the wizard hat icon will show an error in red that says Error: Error with smarty file (see log below). Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the error.

Include template(s)

Check the boxes for the templates you want to be used for this batch. The system will load the templates using the criteria you specified in the fields above.

Clicking the submit button at the bottom of the page will start the batch process.

To see a list of the galleries created by the system, go to the main gallery builder page and click View Export Logs. You can click the links for Today, Last 3 Days or Last week or enter a date range to sort galleries.

The export log is used for internal or affiliate use for bulk importing galleries into a TGP/MGP/Etc. The log lists 1 gallery per line showing a pipe (|) delimited list of fields for each gallery in the following order.

1)     Shows whether it’s an image/movie/combo gallery

2)     Lists the Template Name

3)     Lists the gallery folder which uses the File Prefix specified in step 5 above (this would be the URL of the gallery. For example if this field lists photo1-199-bluebikini, the URL to the gallery would be something like mysite.com/galleries/photo1-199-bluebikini/index.php

4)     Lists the folder containing a random thumbnail image that will be used to represent this gallery on your affiliate front end gallery selection page

5)     Lists the folder containing your template thumbnail image that will be used to represent the template on your affiliate front end gallery selection page

6)     Lists the text description for the gallery

7)     Lists the number of photos and/or movies in the gallery

8)     Lists a comma separated list of categories for the gallery

9)     Lists the model(s) that appear in the gallery