I am researching CMS systems, something I know little about. I am an animator and generate large numbers of files and have many source files that I use. There are so many its become difficult to manage them all and keep some organization. Can someone suggest an Open Source CMS solution that could aid in organizing these files.
Thanks
Apparently, these systems are called "digital asset management systems" when they're not about text but about images.
An overview about open-source ones can be found here
Razuna looks quite good, I'm looking for a similar solution - though i probably won't have trillions of textures files or something, I do have loads of .psd/.ai/.indd formats, which a number of systems offer thumbnail preview to a certain degree.
One thing to look out for is whether the system can handle/use/manipulate IPTC metadata, basically what this means is when metadata is embedded in an asset, the system can present that to you in a digestable format. An example of this is Google's Picassa which allows search indexing on this data. Also a number of stock asset sites both use and produce this data in their asset sets - so when you download an image for example, it comes pre-tagged with "woman, standing, smiling, photo, office" so you only have to add your own tags on top, for example "telecoms project, overview module".
Again, if you're generating a swathe of files from your output then it may depend on the nature of your file output as to what kind of versioning/management you need?
If, for example, you have output that is made up of a bunch of source files, some of which are program-specific and some of which are linked assets, then you might want to put the whole lot under version control (PlasticSCM or Subversion perhaps) and "exclude" graphic files by their file type. Then, use something like Razuna to upload, hold and display your graphic files.
I noticed with Razuna that you can organise things by category, and assign multiple categories - that is, you have 1 set of files but multiple views of them. That's why I liked Razuna, though to be honest the demo crapped out but it could've been because I changed email and profile data half way through the trial.
Interested to know how you go in your search and what you've found to be useful!
We're looking for something as well, preferably cloud-based, but that's not a requirement.
We're looking right now at Razuna. It has a lot of great features. The organization seems very flexilble, which is great. The
But it doesn't seem very mature in some ways. The development team I think is small. Some features don't work reliably (e.g., uploading additional versions of an asset [such as different resolutions] works intermittently and only with IE as far as I can tell.)
So if anyone has any other systems worth a look I'd be glad to hear about them.
In the end, Razuna was just too immature for us. It's a great effort. The dev team is obviously talented and sincere. In a couple of years they may well have a great product. I wish them luck.
We've settled on a commercial service, WebDAM. It some ways it's very comprehensive and does a lot of things well. The price is not too bad, and there's a nice API to program against, so we will be able to lean on it heavily for image selection and then incorporate it into our automated processes, grabbing images as needed programmatically.
In on other ways it a little maddening. The UI, in particular, could use a lot of work to make it easier to use for the average person. It was clearly designed by programmers. A lot of UI niceties that would not be that hard to add are missing. Obvious things like boxes with data being too small while a lot of screen real estate goes unused.
The keyword capability is useful but there doesn't have obvious things like synonyms and stemming when you search. This will make things harder on our users and will have to be planned carefully to make sure it's as useful as it can be.
We're still just in the planning stages, so not sure how it will fly once we go live, but we're going to give it a shot. You might want to have a look at it. But they have a much more mature development effort going on and more support for the customer, which swayed us in the end.
Related
I am bouncing around the idea of creating a custom document versioning system to use on business rule manuals. These manuals are broken up into outlined sections which contain one rule per section which are outlined in various ways (1.1, 1.2, etc). There are many manuals which contain the same rule for different locations in the country (down to the state/county level), however many locations will have different versions of the rules depending on business needs or whatnot.
My thought is to create a system which will manage versions of each section/rule separately. This would make the management of this mess much easier to maintain (think hundreds of manuals times hundreds of rules), and it would make fielding query requests from management much quicker.
Ok, it's a fairly easy and straightforward design to this point. Now for the monkey wrench. These rules are regulated by government agencies, so they must be submitted to and approved by state agencies. In doing this, many states require only the exact pages which are updated for each request to be submitted for approval. Once they are approved, these pages will get a new effective date and the rest of the manual will remain the same. There are business reasons for this process.
So my choice of document format has to allow for flowing layout much like Word, however I need to be able to programatically determine the page range of these sections and if changes or additions will cause a repagination.
The most complex layout will contain only tables, headers/footers, and a table of contents. I have thought about using OOXML, but I don't see a way to determine pagination without loading Word which is something I would prefer to avoid. I could create my own pagination algorithm, but that sounds a lot like reinventing the wheel.
Can anyone offer pointers to a solution whether it is an open document format, a book, or something else? Thank you for taking the time to read this.
If you want a truly modular document, then DocBook might be worth a look. You have all the rich formatting you need but it does need a bit of work. It really depends on who's doing the authoring and what tools they're comfortable using. DocBook is a rich mark-up language and you can do anything from work in the base plain text file or look at a number of WYSIWYG editors, e.g. ArborText.
It's not Word though - which might be enough to put your authors off!
If you did go with DocBook, you would maintain each document section in a separate text file so your versioning solution would work well. DocBook can produce output in a number of formats simultaneously so you could have an HTML version, an OOXML version, and a PDF version produced from the same source. A PDF version of each changed section might be appropriate to send to government agencies for approval.
On pagination, you could make life a lot easier for yourself by not having continuous page numbers. Use section or chapter based page numbering, e.g. page I-1, I-2, ..., II-1, II-2.
Could anyone help me? I need to insert information to the header of a pdf from a customer form online with php. I am not a programmer so I need a sense of direction before I speak to my developers.
The idea is to get licence information from a field, insert the information to the header and save the result as securely as is reasonably possible before the customised file is downloaded.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
This will generally involve opening your existing PDF file with an appropriate PDF manipulation module (Zend_Pdf works for this purpose), performing whatever operations you need, such as inserting data into the document, and then outputting the document to the user with the appropriate headers (content type and disposition) set.
If you want customers to be able to download files several times, it would be wise to have the licensing information be gathered from the user account information, rather than a form.
First of all, asking for information on a particular library or tool to use is off bounds for StackOverflow (as it draws mostly opinionated answers. But even more importantly, in my experience, going to your developers and telling them which library to use while you don't know anything about it and are not a developer, is not generally a good idea. Focus on what you want to accomplish; don't worry too much about what technically is needed for them to do what you want. That's their job.
Looking at your question, there's a couple of things you might think about and discuss with them:
1) Taking information and adding it on top of an existing PDF file, is not the end of the world from a technical point of view. There are probably 100 or more different tools and libraries that can accomplish this in many different ways.
2) Much more technically challenging and worthy of a discussion with them is "save the result as securely as is reasonably possible before the customised file is downloaded". Normally, when you add information to a PDF document, it's not trivial to change it afterwards. But it's far from impossible. And if it's only a matter of removing stuff, it's even easier. A tool such as Adobe Acrobat for example will happily let you remove a bunch of text / graphics from a PDF file. If you want to prevent that, you have to at least protect your PDF document; set a number of flags in it that prevent it from being edited for example.
That's still not going to be waterproof, as these flags are supposed to be honoured by PDF processing applications. Adobe Acrobat does that and so do most other "decent" PDF applications, but it's certainly possible to circumvent this if you want it hard enough.
So, from your product management point of view, think about what reasonably secure means and have a discussion about that with your developers. That's probably going to get you much further than suggesting a particular library they're going to resent instantly because it comes from a non-developer :)
This is a question about the development workflow of front end engineers. I am starting a project for a rather large site with lots of pages, each page has multiple steps, and it's very difficult to lay out all the content in a spreadsheet.
The content of each page will be delivered in a spreadsheet cell, and some pages have multiple variable section that are determined by user's preferences.
I was asked my opinion about how to structure the deliverable. I am wondering if there is a best practice out there for structuring this kind of deliverable? Because when you have a poorly structured deliverable it can be almost as mindnumbing as using pen-and-pencil to write code.
Do you have any tools, formats, practices for creating deliverables that are easy to work with?
It sounds like you are just doing the UI design and then giving it to the front-end engineers.
If that is correct, I would suggest that you see if you can do the rough html/css work to get the page to look as you want, and then they can go in and give it the functionality, but that way you have an idea what is possible.
You can do much of the work, then leave comments about trying to center something a bit better, for example.
I am not a big fan of just getting the design on paper or as an image, it would be easier to just get the html/css.
There are plenty of tools now that make css and html easy to do, even if you have the css inside the html, they can separate the two, but, it would be a huge help to the designers.
Just do one page, and give it to them, and then come back in a day or two and get feedback as to what their thoughts are, and how you can improve what you give them.
As you go through this process, after a while both groups will know what to expect and you can get the rest done quickly.
This is more of an agile methodology with the front-end engineers as your customers.
My suggestion would be mockups or wireframes for the pages. Mockups would be examples of the pages in various states while the wireframe is a detailed document of the structure of the page.
HTML and CSS is way too complicated for mockup use. I usually first create a requirement backlog for UI/functionalities as well (just a list of priorized reqs in Excel).
Especially for a large site development you should also have the process and data flow definitions done (UML or other way of description) to help you define the mentioned requirements.
Based on these you will know what kind of steps does the whole site funcionality need (i.e. pages) and what the page hierarchy and structure will be like. This way it's much easier to get a grasp of the whole thing.
After that we'll create fast wireframes and visualize the end result with fast mockups done as images with Photoshop or similar. These are absolutely vital in my experience as it helps the customer (and other stakeholders) to actually understand what is beind done. For this the html and css are simply too slow to run multiple iterations with.
I am looking into improving the backup process a group of animators use. Currently they back up their work into external hard drives or DVDs manually, taking full copies of everything. The data consists of thousands of high resolution images, project files of various video editing software and sound files. Basically everything is binary data and nothing should ever be merged on checkin.
Should I investigate version control systems that I would use as a software developer (Subversion, GIT etc.), or is there a class of version control systems intended for non-SW data that would suit these needs better?
You could also check out AlienBrain. Its a project asset management system designed for artists.
If your scope is just "backup" then I'd say stick to backup solutions.
But if you are thinking about the whole lifecycle of the animator's work, then the type of use typically falls into the "Digital Asset Management" category for the very reasons you mention: huge data volumes; binary formats.
Since version control (SCM) software is usually designed for text files that can be diff'd and merged, they tend not to do so well with binary formats in high volume. While your average web graphics are not going to be an issue for (software) version control tools, you mention video, which puts you in another league.
The bad news (maybe - depends on your business) is that DAM is dominated by the big end of town. #Atmospherian has mentioned AlienBrain which is a good representative of niche offering for artists. At the other end of the spectrum you have more general purpose offerings like Oracle's UCM (formerly Stellent). Make sure you check the price tags though.
There must be open source or lower cost alternatives available - but I don't know them, sorry.
What does seem to be very common are custom inhouse solutions. Unlike managing code, where changes to the files themselves have their own significance, managing digital assets tends to focus on the metadata (the image/video is just an associated blob). And since since many shops have their own particular production workflow, it makes the territory ripe for some skunkworks programming (if that's your bent - go for it!).
So while I'm not recommending any particular products, I suggest if you think "digital asset management" rather than "version control" when scouting for solutions you will probably find answers more suited to your needs.
Your question is a little unclear - you seem to have conflated version control and backup.
If what you want is version control, then take a look at the list on wikipedia: Comparison of revision control software. That shows most of the widely known version control systems, and their basic features. You're looking for something where you can set it up to force user's to checkout before they edit. Be aware that commercial solutions range in price from moderately expensive up to 'You want HOW much?'
If what you want is backup software, then I'd start at List of backup software in wikipedia. There's a lot more choices in the backup software arena, and there are a lot of price points.
Either way, figure in the creation of a admin position (either as part of someone's job or a new person altogether, if you're big enough). I've worked with backup and version control systems that didn't have an admin and it's a problem. Either no one takes care of problems, or everyone gets their fingers in there and really screws things up. Either way, making it part of someone's job (officially) is the best way to limit damage.
I think Clearcase would work for you.The reason being everything is VOB(VersionedObject) no matter what it is ! Check once
From your description, it sounds like you would do pretty well with some basic backup software such as Retrospect. Using daily backups of workstations, only changed data would be backed up and it would be easy to roll back to an earlier version of a file if needed.
What you don't get from such a setup is the ability to check out / check in files and get warnings about conflicts.
Vidyatel has an editing software that can compere video content and find the difference between the video versions leaning on the video only.
The result is in - EDL/TC.
It might help.
You should take a look at boar. It is exactly what you want, "version control and backup for photos, videos and other binary files". It is version control designed for large binary files.
I am interested in choosing a good structure for an online message board-type application. I will use SO as an example, as I think it's an example that we are all familiar with, but my question is more general; it is about how to achieve the right balance between organization and flexibility in online message boards.
The questions page is a load of random stuff. It moves quickly (some might say, too quickly) and contains a huge number of questions that I'm not interested in.
The idea, I imagine, is that we can use tags to find questions that we're interested in. However, I'm not sure that this works: you can't use tags negatively. I'm not interested in PHP or perl or web development. I want to exclude such posts. But with the tags, I can't.
Although discrete subforums are in a sense less flexible, as they generally force you to pick a category even if a question might fit into two (if SO had, say, areas for "Web Development", "Games development", "Computer Science", "Systems Programming", "Databases", etc. then sure, some people might want to post about developing of web-based games, for example) is it worth sacrificing some of that flexibility in order to make it easier to find the content that you are interested in, and hide the content that you are not interested in?
Is there any way with a pure tagging system to achieve the greater ease of use that subforums provide?
The real problem with subforums comes when you guess wrong about which topics have enough interest to get their own subforums. While some topics end up with their own vibrant subcommunities others end up as empty ghettos, with little activity or feeling of community. Topics that might flourish as occasional subjects in a larger forum end up fragmented among many subforums, none of which has the critical mass of people necessary to have an active, vibrant community.
Though I think that tagging is supperior to grouping, people tend to think hierarchically.
In general it depends on the target group for the forum.
Maybe you can go with a mixture: use tagging and later use tag groups to order to posts. Delicious uses this, for example, and I find it rather helpful.
If you're worried about the divide between specific forums and open tag-based systems, like Stack Overflow, consider making a query system that allows you to do a bit more complex queries than just the AND operator, like here on Stack Overflow.
I cannot make a query here that will give me all questions in .NET, SQL or C#, combined, and that is the biggest irritation I have with the tags. With such a query system, you can create virtual forums at least.
Other than that, I don't really have a good opinion. I like both, and I haven't yet decided which one is best.
The idea, I imagine, is that we can use tags to find questions that we're interested in. However, I'm not sure that this works: you can't use tags negatively. I'm not interested in PHP or perl or web development. I want to exclude such posts. But with the tags, I can't.
While it's currently the case that you can't use tags to hide content, it shouldn't be impossible. Using SO as an example again, there's no reason that a system similar to the ignore function on a forum couldn't be made for the tag system. By adding a right-click context menu or a small "X" link somewhere in the tag display, tags could be marked as ignored. This would also allow the current tag feature to function; Seeing everything (minus your ignore list), or clicking a tag to see only questions with that tag.
Ignored tags could be managed in your profile if you should later develop an interest in PHP or INTERCAL that you lacked before.
The real question is that of performance. In my head it's as simple as replacing a SELECT [stuff] WHERE Tag = 'buffer-overflow' with SELECT [stuff] WHERE Tag NOT IN ('php','offtopic','funny-hat-friday') but I've not put together any DB backed sites that get absolutely pounded on by thousands people.