[ubuntu-art] PHP/MySQL tasks on the art.ubuntu.com website

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Hi,

You guys expressed an interest is doing some PHP/MySQL work on the new 
art website. Over the past week I've dug into it a bit and taught myself 
some basic PHP just to get it up and running, though this is not a 
viable approach for the long term (ie. I don't really have the PHP 
skills ATM to write good code). After launching the site, a few issues 
have cropped up that could use some work. I'll list them here and post 
them on the wiki:

* Code comments and cleanup: there are very few comments in the code. It 
might be a good exercise for someone to go through and add sensible 
comments and perhaps even clean up the code in various ways if they have 
the experience to do that. I already abstracted out some hard-coded 
things like site name, contact email etc., from the original gnome 
in-line versions to variables in the config file, but more of this could 
be done.

* Direct upload: The way we are currently uploading images is awful! the 
gnome version had some server-specific stuff that I couldn't get working 
and had to work around. Their version was less than super-convenient, 
but ours is directly dreadful. It's quite easy for artists/users to 
submit artwork, but it's then a very laborious process for the admins to 
upload it and link to the right place. Getting it to work they way the 
original does would help, but making a solution where the original 
submitter uploads artwork and thumbnails directly would be much better 
(into a holding area for evaluation). It would be good if you didn't 
have to tick the box next to the URL field but that the application 
detected that there was text in it and also what extension was used.

* Automatically generated thumbnails (on upload). From backgrounds, 
screenshots, etc. we could get automatically generated 96x72px 
thumbnails with Imagemagik or GD, saving the uploader from making them.

* Enhanced ranking system for better filtering: We will be using this 
site for both WIP art and as a repository for end users, who might 
prefer not to wade through tons of unfinished stuff with comments. 
Perhaps we could add a flag to each entry denoting whether it's 
production quality (this would apply more to themes and icon sets that 
can be broken or incomplete) or just a default browse mode at 1 star 
(currently 0) that can be changed by the user. Themes and iconsets might 
also be associated with one or more releases (known to work with 5.10, etc.)

I'm CCing the gnome art list on this too so we can coordinate 
developments. It would be great if we could manage to keep the source in 
the same tree so we can all benefit from future improvements.

- Henrik