[drupal-devel] New image.module

[James Walker]

Hey all,

As promised, I've just committed brand new versions of "my" 
image.module to my sandbox. A working version for CVS HEAD is at : 
contributions/sandbox/walkah/image (compatible with the new "image 
api"). There is also a 4.5 version available in the "45" subdirectory.

As I've mentioned in #drupal and briefly on this list, this version 
comes with a slightly new approach. You may notice that the image.*sql 
files have been removed. This is because image.module no longer 
requires it's own tables. Instead, it uses the files table (previously 
only used by upload.module) to store information about all files 
(various resolutions) in this table. This has several benefits: First, 
it greatly simplifies the installation of image.module, but more 
importantly it keeps better track of each image associated with the 
node. Where previous image.modules (mine included) relied on naming 
conventions to keep track of various sizes & resolutions, this image 
module actually has a record for each size - including it's filesize 
(making it easy to write a quota.module - for instance).

The other major addition (which was previously left out intentionally) 
is the re-introduction of basic image gallery functionality. This is 
minimalistic intentionally - and not meant to stifle or otherwise 
conflict with other initiatives (such as moshe's album.module). A 
couple things to note:  the maintenance of gallery albums is done at 
?q=admin/image and should be familiar in style for those of you who 
have tried HEAD's latest forum.module. Also, the layout no longer uses 
tables - as I'm sure some of you will enjoy. However, I don't fancy 
myself much of a designer, so suggestions / recommendations on 
"default" look and feel are of course very welcome. For those of you 
that don't like the approach at all - theme('image_album', $albums, 
$images) :)

Now, due to the change in DB storage approach - I have included an 
'update-images.php' ... which needs to be run from the root of your 
drupal installation. I have done testing on this - however, I'm not 
gonna claim complete perfection here. I'd love to have folks with 
image.module installations test this out - PLEASE backup your image 
files and tables first !!!!

Moving forward - I'd really like to get this into modules/image as soon 
as possible so that we (as a community) can use project.module for bug 
& feature tracking (rather than random emails / IRC chats / etc). 
Ideally, I'd like this to happen by the time contrib is branched for 
DRUPAL-4-6 so for 4.6 there will be no confusion of which image.module 
to use, etc. As there is a 4.5 version as well, I'm willing to move 
that into the DRUPAL-4-5 branch, but I'd like to get some consensus on 
that - as I worry it might 'cause more confusion than is really 
necessary.

Again, this is not intended as a final version - lots of people are 
using image in a lot of interesting ways, I'd be happy to try and 
accommodate all features, either through "API"-style functions & 
features or as base functionality in the module - but would like to get 
some feedback from the community at large as to what people would like 
to see.

Cheers,
--
James Walker  ::  http://www.walkah.net/