TTG Pages - TTG Highslide - TTG Client Response

[Denis Pagé]

Buyed TTG Pages yesterday... Matthew on his blog say that Pages "is fun to use". For me, this is an understatement. I would say "TTG Pages is instant reward!". The problem is that the fun do not last very long as you are done in no time! Two hours for an entire site? Yes I did!

Now for the glitches and question: Posting more than one in a single thread can be hard to handle so I will go by numbers to ease the answers.
[list type=decimal]
[li]1. Started to use TTG Pages at work playing around to get familiar. I translated the menus to french among other things and saved as a template with its own name. I copied the .lrwebengine and template on my USB memory stick to bring home. Once home, I installed the engine and template at their proper locations and fired up Lightroom. Selected around ten images from a Collection and went to Web module. All was looking fine. So I choosed my previously saved template, the Gallery then appeared but my french menus were not there (?!). No big deal, easily redone...[/li]
[li]2. To make my own template, I started with the "Dark City" template. Under "Menu settings" of the engine, I changed the "Hover Color" from the very light gray to a medium to dark orange to fit my ID Plate. I do see the orange in the box in the right panel but I am still not able to get this color when mousing over the menu items. They still highlight pale gray even once Gallery is exported.[/li]
[li]3. In TTG Client Response I modified the FormToEmail.php script to use FormToEmailRemote and I get the client selections by mail as expected. In TTG Pages, I enabled "Form-to-Email Remote" in the panel, copied my UserID from Admin Panel at FormToEmail site. When someone fill the form in the "Contact" page, I get nothing! But I noticed something strange in the right panel while designing the site: I saw the value "1,'" under "Form ID". So I changed it for "1" then pressed enter. I was still showing 1 so good so far and I then exported. Noticed the coma in "1,'"? This is because I use the Canadian French keyboard and I do not know how to remap the decimal separator alone on the Mac. This is very annoying when typing numbers as the dot beside the zero is not valid typing IP addresses on the numeric keypad as it give me a coma.[/li]
[li]4. Now the question: As I buyed TTG Client Response a couple days ago to fit with Pages, did I made the wrong choice over TTG Highslide for its similar client response mode? The fact is that the header and menus in TTG Client Response do not integrate well with Pages...[/li]
[li]5. I would like to revert the sort order in the Gallery Index page. This because my galleries are named by date (by events YYYY-MM-DD) and I have many. I don't want the visitors to scroll all the way down most of the time... Or did I missed it?[/li]
[li]6. I wish another option to be added to the Contact form of TTG Pages and the Order form of TTG Client Response that should be easy to implement. A big proportion of my clients live far away from the city and have no internet access or slow access to it. That would be great if when filling the form, rather than sending an email, the webengine just put the entries in a textfile.txt that the user can rename and save ready to put on a diskette or USB stick and send it to me. That way, this would be possible for me to put the site and its Client Select galleries on a CD that I can distribute to them first.[/li]
[/list]
Amazing job Matthew! Thanks!

P.S.: Ian, we lost the <OL> equivalent tag again!

 

[theturninggate]

Hi Denis,

1. Not really sure about that. Are you sure you saved the changes to your template properly? Is it possible you might have saved the template at some point as your worked, then changed your menus and forgotten to update the preset?

2. Make sure you're changing the colors in the Menu Settings section of controls. There are also controls in the Header / Page Settings that allow you to set links for the rest of the page, and these items do not affect the menus.

3. For some reason, Lightroom always renders "1" as "1.''" in text input fields. Slightly irritating. From what I have seen, though, when it exports, it should work properly.

4. As you have noticed, TTG Client Response Gallery has not been updated to coincide with TTG Pages. At this time, I would definitely say that TTG Highslide Gallery (Pro) would have been the better choice. The client response gallery will be updated at some point, as I find the time to work through older releases to bring them up to speed. My release yesterday of the new TTG Shadowbox Gallery is my first go at tackling these dinosaurs and getting them updated.

5. There is a toggle in the PHP file that causes the index items to be listed in reverse order. Check the documentation for TTG Auto Index for more information on making this change. The auto index in TTG Pages is based on the same script, and therefore all of the TTG Auto Index documentation applies.

6. This wouldn't work. PHP requires a web-server to run. Therefore, you would never be able to put the gallery on a CD. The gallery would work, and the images, etc. But not the script for emailing, nor any script for creating TXT files.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Denis Pagé]

[quote author=theturninggate link=topic=7943.msg54296#msg54296 date=1254'67716]
2. Make sure you're changing the colors in the Menu Settings section of controls. There are also controls in the Header / Page Settings that allow you to set links for the rest of the page, and these items do not affect the menus.[/quote]

:-[ Was making the change in "Header / Page Settings"... and naturally tought it was a "Menu Settings" thing. Another English to French misunderstanding perhaps.

5. There is a toggle in the PHP file that causes the index items to be listed in reverse order. Check the documentation for TTG Auto Index for more information on making this change. The auto index in TTG Pages is based on the same script, and therefore all of the TTG Auto Index documentation applies.

HaHa! There is the catch! My memory told me I saw something in the past about reverse order or someone asking about it. Just didn't thought about reading instructions for a different gallery engine than the one I choose...

6. This wouldn't work. PHP requires a web-server to run.

Silly me! :-[ So obvious!!! As I just made a couple installs of Apache/PHP servers and working on a third, I feel quite embasassed just asking. But my enthousiasm was so high after making this whole site in no time that it seem that I got lost in my dreams. :icon_lol:

On Hover color now sorted and will look at the "reverse order".

Looking this week at the implementation of a 6''GB (data storage, unlimited bandwidth) server in a big datacenter thanks to TTG to make it a simple thing now! 8)

Now for one more request: In each "TTG Client Response Gallery" I make, indexed by "TTG Pages", I repeat instruction on how to navigate them to get a more pleasant navigation time. This is bad practice as it is to be repeated on each gallery and when I want to make a change, I have to regenerate ALL the TTG CRG galleries with 1''-2'' images each! I wanted to put those instructions in "TTG Pages" at top of the "Gallery Index" but can't make paragraphs there. Same number of headers and paragraphs in this section as in the others would be GREAT!

As a last note, I understand that you don't have Adobe's ressources at your disposal and have to work almost alone on all this. As a programmer, i understand the problems of tracking all those changes/integration bits. I found that making localization (french in my case) with TTG Pages was very easy and complete over the whole site generated. This was key in my purchase decision! Here I want to point to the Contact Form where we can easily change words over the boxes to be filled and the word(s) on the "Send" button. As for now I can do with the "TTG Client Response" and that it is in your projects to make it match "TTG Pages", just put a little note in your ToDo list for that one to make it as easy to change those. For now, I guess I will have to dig in the FormToEmail.php script to make that translation which I can do. It is just on more step.

Have a good day!