Gallery Server Pro DotNetNuke Module QuickStart …...Select the module Gallery Server Pro from the...

Gallery Server Pro DotNetNuke Module

QuickStart Guide Version 2.4.3

Released December 3, 2010

Gallery Server Pro DotNetNuke Module QuickStart Guide of 39

Table of Contents 1. Welcome .................................................................................................................................................................2

How Gallery Server Pro works ............................................................................................................................2

Requirements .....................................................................................................................................................3

License and product key .....................................................................................................................................3

Known issues ......................................................................................................................................................3

2. Adding Your First Gallery ........................................................................................................................................4

Installation ..........................................................................................................................................................4

3. Key Concepts ..........................................................................................................................................................7

Defining the terms ..............................................................................................................................................7

Security model ....................................................................................................................................................9

4. Enhanced Thumbnail Generation ........................................................................................................................ 13

5. How-To Examples ................................................................................................................................................ 14

How-To: Convert an existing set of directories and files to a read-only gallery ............................................. 14

How-To: Set up multiple galleries .................................................................................................................... 18

How-To: Adding a slide show .......................................................................................................................... 23

How-To: Create treeview menu ...................................................................................................................... 34

1. Welcome Gallery Server Pro helps you share photos, video, audio, documents and other files in your DotNetNuke

website. This module is a slightly modified version of the free, open source stand-alone version of Gallery Server Pro, which began in 2005 and has since become one of the most popular web galleries.

How Gallery Server Pro works

Once installed, add an instance of Gallery Server Pro to one or more pages in your DotNetNuke website. Any host account or user in the Administrators role automatically has permission to manage the gallery.


Media files can be added in two ways: (1) Copy media files to the designated directory and use the Synchronize function to import them into the gallery. (2) Upload them with the built-in upload function. ZIP files are automatically extracted.

Gallery Server Pro automatically creates thumbnail images and – for large images – compressed, bandwidth-friendly images. Metadata is extracted from image, video, and audio files.

The media files are stored in one or more directories on the server or any UNC-accessible location (such as a NAS device or network share). Information about these files, such as width, height, caption, etc., is stored in the database.

Security roles can be used to restrict access to albums and media objects.

Requirements

Server Requirements:

1. DotNetNuke 5.0 or higher

2. The DotNetNuke web application must be running at Full Trust. (This is required to support the .resx language files.)

Client Requirements:

1. Any modern web browser (IE 5+, Netscape 6+, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome)

2. Certain media types may require the applicable browser plug-in. For example, viewing Flash video requires the Adobe Flash plug-in.

License and product key A copy of the license is included with the module. There are two versions:

Gallery Server Pro DotNetNuke Module Professional – Includes full functionality, an unlimited number of media objects, and can be installed on an unlimited number of portals in a single DotNetNuke installation.

Gallery Server Pro DotNetNuke Module Enterprise – Includes features of the Professional version, plus access to source code and rights to modify it for end-user use.

Gallery Server Pro is fully functional for the first 30 days. At the end of the trial period, a watermark appears on each image and the Site admin area becomes read-only. Enter a product key to restore full functionality. Purchase a product key at snowcovered.com.

Known issues 1. Only one module instance per web page is supported.

2. Internet Explorer 8 and earlier versions do not support the rounded corners CSS style, so objects appear with square corners.

http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=242&PackageID=19158


2. Adding Your First Gallery

Upgrading Upgrading the Gallery Server Pro module from an earlier version is easy. Just install the module as if you

were doing a fresh install. DotNetNuke automatically upgrades your existing version.

HINT: If you run into any trouble, try restarting your application and trying again.

Installation 1. Log in to your DotNetNuke web site as a host user and go to the Module Settings page. Download the

module ZIP file and install it to your DotNetNuke web site.

NOTE: The module uses .asmx web services and .xaml files for an enhanced user experience.

DotNetNuke will warn you that these are restricted file types. Select the option Ignore File Restrictions

to proceed.

NOTE: The installation writes to the following files and directories: web.config, App_GlobalResources,

bin, and DesktopModules. Make sure the IIS application pool identity has permission to write to these

locations.

2. Navigate to the page where you want to install the gallery. Select the module Gallery Server Pro from the dropdown box, choose additional options as desired, and click Add Module.


3. Your new gallery appears:


4. That’s it! Your new gallery is ready to go. Create albums, upload objects or change settings by selecting Site admin in the Actions menu.

QUICK TIP: By default the gallery allows you to upload any of the allowed file extensions defined in the

host settings. Enable additional file types on the Media Object Types page in the Site admin area.

QUICK TIP: By default DotNetNuke requires that all uploads be less than 8 MB and take less than 110

seconds to transfer to the server. Read the DotNetNuke wiki Working with large files to learn how to

change this.

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Wiki/tabid/1409/Page/Working-with-large-files/Default.aspx


3. Key Concepts

Defining the terms There are a few key ideas that will help you get the most out of Gallery Server Pro.

Gallery

A gallery is a collection of albums and media objects bound together with a common set of settings, such as file storage location, watermark settings, image size, and allowed file types. You can have as many galleries as you want.

For example, you may want some images to be 640x480 and others to be smaller (or larger).

A single gallery is created the first time you add Gallery Server Pro to a page. Each instance of a module on a page is linked to one gallery. The same gallery can be used on several pages.

Manage your galleries with the Gallery Manager in the Site admin area.

Albums and media objects

An album is a container for media objects. A media object is an image, audio, video, or document file, or – in the case of external media objects – a snippet of HTML that links to a resource on the web (a YouTube video, for example).

Each album is linked to a corresponding directory on disk. This directory exists within the file storage location defined for the gallery. There is no limit to the number of albums.

QUICK TIP: Change the disk location for media files on the Media Objects – General page in the Site

admin area.

When you upload a file to the gallery, it is copied to the album’s directory. When you move or copy a media object or album, the file or directory is moved or copied. In other words, Gallery Server Pro synchronizes the structure of your gallery with the files and directories on disk.

Gallery settings and Gallery control settings

A gallery setting is simple: it is a setting that applies to a specific gallery. Most of the pages in the Site admin area help you manage this type of setting.

But what is a gallery control setting? These are settings that apply to a specific instance of a Gallery Server Pro module on a page. There is a single page where these settings are managed: the Gallery Control Settings page:


The Gallery Control Settings page helps you define the look and behavior of the gallery for a particular web page.

VERY IMPORTANT: Changing a gallery control setting OVERRIDES the gallery setting.

User albums

A user album is an album that is assigned to a particular user who can manage it as their own personal album. When the user albums feature is enabled, albums are automatically created for each account. The permissions given to each user are copied from a template role named _Album Owner Template. An administrator can modify the permissions on this role to control what the user can do to their album.

User albums are managed on the User Settings page in the Site admin area.


NOTE: Modifications to the template role only affect new user albums, not existing ones.

Security model

Security overview

Gallery Server Pro offers a rich security model that is tightly integrated with the DotNetNuke users and roles. Access to gallery objects is controlled by a user’s role membership. For example, below is a role that provides Add media objects permission to the album User Submissions (this is a screenshot from the Manage Roles page in Gallery Server Pro):


Users in this role can upload files to this album. If you include this user in a second role that has view access to the entire gallery, the user will be able to view all media objects but can upload files only to the ‘User Submissions’ album.

DotNetNuke users/roles versus Gallery Server Pro users/roles

As you know, DotNetNuke lets you manage users and roles. Gallery Server Pro also lets you manage users and roles:


These are the same users and roles as you see in the DotNetNuke management screens. It doesn’t matter if you create a user on the DotNetNuke User Accounts page or the Gallery Server Pro Manage Users page – it is still a standard DotNetNuke user under the hood. It is the same with roles, although there is a wrinkle: Roles created within Gallery Server Pro are placed in a role group named Gallery Server Pro. Later, if you uninstall the module, all roles in this group are deleted. So if you want a role to survive Gallery Server Pro’s removal, add it on the DotNetNuke Security Roles page.

WHY TWO SYSTEMS FOR USERS AND ROLES? Recall that Gallery Server Pro began as a stand-alone web

application that was later adapted to DotNetNuke. The stand-alone app needed its own facility for

managing users and roles. To ensure a quality DotNetNuke module through the creation of new

versions, the module retains this functionality.


Who can do what now?

Okay, there are host accounts, DotNetNuke administrators, and Gallery Server Pro gallery administrators. Just to be clear, let’s go over them.

Host accounts – These are the superusers of DotNetNuke. They have access to all portals and can do anything in Gallery Server Pro. Host users have access to two extra pages in the Site admin area: a general page for application-wide settings such as the product key, and a backup/restore page for managing the data.

NOTE: There is one thing host accounts can’t do: they cannot have a user album.


DotNetNuke administrators – These are accounts in the built-in DotNetNuke Administrators role. They have portal-level management capability and can do anything in Gallery Server Pro except view the two application-level pages that host accounts can see.

Gallery Server Pro gallery administrators – These are accounts that are in a role with ‘Admin gallery’ permissions (specified on Gallery Server Pro’s Manage Roles page). They have complete control over one or more galleries, but do not have any DotNetNuke-specific permissions, nor can they add or delete users and roles or explicitly add or remove users to or from roles.

However, they can perform actions that cause roles to be (a) created or deleted, and (b) added to or removed from users. For example, a gallery administrator can assign another user as an owner of an album. Under the hood, this action causes a role to be created and assigned to that user. Similarly, a gallery administrator can enable user albums, which internally uses roles to manage security access.

By default, all host accounts and DotNetNuke admins are gallery administrators for all galleries. But any user can be made a gallery administrator.

A gallery administrator can create additional galleries, but cannot access existing galleries unless a host account or DotNetNuke administrator explicitly gives the user permission.

Gallery Server Pro never lets a user perform a DotNetNuke administrative task (such as adding a user or role) that they cannot already do using existing DotNetNuke functionality. If you think you see such behavior, it is a security bug and should be immediately reported.

4. Enhanced Thumbnail Generation Gallery Server Pro supports the extraction of thumbnail images from virtually all videos, text files, PDF,

EPS, and PSD (Photoshop) files. Below are two albums showing thumbnails generated from a variety of video and document files.


Thumbnail creation is made possible through the use of three open source components:

ImageMagick – Creates thumbnail images from EPS, PSD, TXT, and PDF files. It requires GhostScript to be able to create images from EPS and PDF files.

GhostScript – GhostScript knows about the internal format of EPS and PDF files.

FFmpeg – Creates thumbnail images from video files.

These utilities must be installed separately. ImageMagick and FFmpeg are EXE files that can be copied into the bin directory of the web application. GhostScript must be installed using a setup program. You can acquire these programs from the sites linked above or from any number of sites that redistribute them. For your convenience, I created a Gallery Server Pro Binary Pack that includes all three. Download it from www.galleryserverpro.com.

Installing these utilities is optional. If they are not present, Gallery Server Pro falls back to the default technique of using a generic image for the thumbnail.

NOTE: Our experience has demonstrated that you must install the 32-bit version of GhostScript, even

when installing on a 64-bit server.

5. How-To Examples

How-To: Convert an existing set of directories and files to a read-only gallery There are three basic ways to create a gallery on your website:

Create albums and upload files with the web interface.

http://www.imagemagick.org/

http://www.ghostscript.com/

http://ffmpeg.org/

http://www.galleryserverpro.com/downloaddnn.aspx


Copy directories and files to the web site and run a synchronize operation.

Tell Gallery Server Pro to use the files at an existing location.

Here we focus on the third option. For example, you may have a large repository of files on a NAS device or network file server. You want to expose this collection on your website but for security reasons you want to restrict the web site to read-only access to these files.

1. Create the page that will hold the gallery, and then add an instance of Gallery Server Pro.

2. Select Site admin from the Actions menu, and then click User Settings in the menu at the left. Verify that user albums are disabled.

3. Now go to the Media Objects – General page. Configure the options as shown below, substituting your own path for the media files directory, thumbnail directory, and compressed images directory.


4. Choose Synchronize from the Actions menu, select the recursive option, and then click the Synchronize button.

NOTE: The synch process builds thumbnail and compressed versions of the media files. This is a

processor-intensive operation, so please be patient. Subsequent synch operations will be much faster

since it will only process new or changed media files.


5. Refresh the page to see the newly added media objects. Notice the Actions menu won’t let you perform any tasks that would modify the files in the repository.


QUICK TIP: For an extra measure of measure of security, configure the IIS application pool identity to

only have read access to the repository.

How-To: Set up multiple galleries Imagine you are an IT Administrator and you want to give the Marketing and Engineering departments

their own galleries. Employee Bob can administer the Marketing gallery and Vino can control the Engineering gallery. Each can view – but not manage – the other gallery.

1. Create the two pages that will hold the two galleries – one named Marketing and the other named Engineering. Add an instance of Gallery Server Pro to each.


2. On the Marketing page, go to the Gallery Manager by selecting Site admin in the Actions menu. Edit the name of the gallery to be Marketing, as shown below.

NOTE: If you wish to use a different path for the media files, go to the Media Objects – General page

and change it.

3. Go to the Manage Roles page and click Add new role. Give it the name Marketing Admin Role and specify Admin gallery permissions to the Marketing gallery, as seen here:


4. Go to the Manage Users page and add the Bob account to the new role. (If necessary, first create the account using either the Manage Users page or DotNetNuke’s User Accounts page.)

5. The Marketing page is done, so now let’s work on the Engineering page. Navigate to that page and go to the Gallery Manager.


6. Create a new gallery named Engineering:

7. Switch to the new gallery by selecting it from the dropdown list and clicking Switch to selected gallery:


8. By default, only administrators can view the new gallery. Since we want to give all registered users view access, we need to add this gallery to the Registered Users role. Go to the Manage Roles page and edit the Registered Users Role. Select the Engineering gallery and save.


9. Now create a role named Engineering Admin Role, and add account Vino to it.

10. That’s it! Bob has administrative rights to the Marketing gallery and Vino controls the Engineering gallery. Since both are automatically members of the Registered Users role, they have view access to all the galleries.

How-To: Adding a slide show to a page It takes just a few clicks to add a slide show to any page. In this example we will add a slide show to the

left pane of the home page.


1. Let us assume you already have a gallery installed that contains the album you want to display in a slide show. Here I have an album named Gardens I want to use:


2. On the page where the slide show should go, add an instance of Gallery Server Pro. Specify the desired pane. Here I am adding it to the left pane:


3. The gallery appears in the left pane. There really isn’t enough room for it, so things look pretty ugly. But that is okay, since we’ll be changing the view.


4. Select Site admin from the Actions menu, and then click the Gallery Control Settings page in the menu. Configure the options on this page to match the following two screen shots and then save.


5. View the home page to see the results of your changes.


6. The gallery is now showing a slide show of all the images in the Garden album. It looks pretty good, but the images are too large. Let’s resize them to be around 200px. Go back to the Site admin area and click the Media Objects – Images menu item. Change the setting “Length of longest side of compressed images” to 200 and then save:


7. Updating this setting does not immediately modify existing images. To create a new set of resized images, we need to synchronize the album. Select Synchronize from the Actions menu. Check the option Overwrite existing compressed images and click Synchronize.


8. Now refresh the home page to see the results:


9. That looks great! Just one more thing: The module title and printer icon can be a little distracting, so use the standard DotNetNuke functionality to edit the module settings (click Settings from the arrow to the left of the text Gallery Server Pro) and turn off the container and printer settings if you prefer.


10. Now look at the final design, which can be seen in the screenshot at the beginning of this tutorial. In that screenshot, the Actions menu is hidden because no user is logged on.

Quick tips

1. The Actions menu is always visible for administrators, even when the Show Actions menu option is turned off on the Gallery Control Settings page.

2. Changing the size of the images will affect all pages where those images are displayed. If you need the images to be two different sizes (for example, 200px for a slide show and 640px elsewhere), create additional galleries and move or copy your images to it. Then update the settings in that gallery to the desired size.

How-To: Create treeview menu Your gallery can be represented as a treeview. Clicking on an album takes the user to another page

where the album is displayed. This allows quick and efficient navigation in places where space is limited, such as the home page.

1. You should have already installed a gallery with your albums and media objects. In this example I have a page named Gallery that contains a set of sample objects:


2. On the page where the treeview menu should go, add an instance of Gallery Server Pro. Specify the desired pane. Here I am adding it to the left pane:


3. The gallery appears in the left pane. There really isn’t enough room for it, so things look pretty ugly. But that is okay, since we’ll be changing the view.


4. Select Site admin from the Actions menu, and then click the Gallery Control Settings page in the menu. Configure the options on this page to match the following screen shot and then save.

NOTE: Replace “Gallery.aspx” with the URL of the page you want the user to go to when they click an

album.


5. View the home page to see the results of your changes. In this screen shot, I have edited the module settings to hide the title and printer/minimize icons, and logged out so that the Actions menu is hidden.


6. That’s it! Click one of the albums to see its contents on the gallery page.

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