The Flex Event-Album

The Flex Event-Album is ideal for quickly sharing foto albums with your friends or customers. Users can add their comments and leave their email address (spam safe!), so the album is also a fine tool for community building. Quickly publish your pics from clubbings, birthday parties or any other event. Your friends will come back to your website to see the pics, look up people they met and send them a message.

It is called the Flex Event-Album because it is flexible in many ways.

1. It automatically adapts to the size of the window your visitor has opened. When the window is resized, thumbnails and images will be resized too.
   
2. Thumbnails are created automatically.
   
3. It comes with a CSS stylesheet, so you can adapt colors, fonts, fontsize etc to match it to the style of your website.
   
4. It comes with an upload facility that will resize your images automatically while uploading.
   
5. You can configure the language. All labels that appear in the album (like: "Add you comment", "Your name here" etc.) can be configured, so you can have it labelled in any language you like or just adapt it to a more serious or a more colloquial style, just as you see fit.
   
6. You can allow all visitors to add comments, or you can restrict commenting to users who know the right username/password combination.
   
7. As admin of course you can delete unwanted comments.
   
8. Your visitors can leave their email address. When other visitors click the "mail me" link, they will be taken to a mailform that will send their mail without revealing the email address.

Setup:

1. On your local computer, create the folder flex. Extract the zip-file into this folder. After extracting, this folder should contain 17 files and 2 folders: albums and graphic_elements.
   
2. Upload the folder with its subfolders to your server.
   
3. Change permissions for flex/configure.inc.php to 666 using chmod.
   Change permissions for the folder flex/albums to 777 using chmod.
   Change permissions for flex/albums/directories.dat to 666 using chmod.
   
4. If you want a different cover image, upload your own image as flex/graphic_elements/cover.jpg.
   

Using the Flex Event-Album:

1. Open flex/admin.php to enter your configuration. The initial username for the admin is Admin, the initial password is abc123. When you change one or both and click Submit, you will get the message Not authorized. Close the browser window, open it again, and log in with your new combination.
   
2. In the admin section you can configure username/password cominations for amin and users. You can configure if users need combination or not to comment. You can configure the size of the thumbnail bar in percent of the window width (it will be resized according to the size of the opened window). You can configure the width of the comments fields in pixels. You can choose if you want to resize your images automatically while uploading. You can set the maximum size for the images and the JPEG quality. You can configure the wording of all the labels in the album, including error messages for the mail form.
   
3. To create an album, click Manage albums. To add an album, enter its name in the field marked New album and click Submit. To delete an album check the according checkbox and click Submit. You can add a new album and delete several unwanted albums in one go. An album will be stored in a folder of the same name. So you can only use characters you would normally use for folders, plus whitespace and /. Whitespace will be replaced by _ and / by ! in the folder name. Birthday party 12/07/2005 is a legal album name. You can also change the order of the albums: Mark an album by checking the radio button beside it and then click Up or Down.
   
4. To upload images click the appropriate album in the list. You can upload up to 10 images in one go. If you have chosen Resize on upload in the configuration panel the images will be resized to the size in pixels you have defined in the configuration panel. If the format is portrait, this size will be used for the height, and the width adjusted accordingly. If the format is landscape, the width will be resized to the given size and the height adjusted accordingly. Although the Flex Event-Album will always adapt the size of the images it sends to the browser to the size of the opened window, it would be wise not to store to big images on the server. Please note that the script resizes the images before sending them to the browser. If the user has a small window open and saves the image, a small image will actually be saved.
   
5. The link for your visitors is flex/index.php. If you want to restrict commenting to users who know the username/password combination, they should instead use flex/login.php. Also when you want to log in as the admin you should use flex/login.php. You can only give out one username/password combination for all users who are allowed to comment. This combination will be valid for all albums.
   
   If you want to log out, you must close the browser window.
   
6. When visitors open the Flex Event-Album, they will see the cover image and a list of available albums. When an album is clicked, the album list moves out and the thumbnail bar moves in. Clicking on a thumbnail will display the image in the display panel on the right.
   
7. When visitors are allowed to enter comments (either because everybody is allowed, or they logged in with the rigth combination) they will see a link in the upper lef corner of the display panel. On clicking this link a form will move in where they can enter their comment. Comments will be strewn randomly over the display panel when the Show comments link in the upper right corner of the display panel is clicked. They will move out again when the Hide comments link is clicked.
   
8. When a visitor has left their email, a Mail me link will appear in the comment. This is not an ordinary mail link. Crawlers cannot read the email address because it is never sent to the browser. Instead on clicking the Mail me link, visitors will be taken to a mail form where they can enter their message. The script will then mail it to the author of the comment. This mailform by the way is an adaption of the Cushy Mailform by [useful]<scripts>