Group project Step 2 - RT Settings and Templates

[sarettah]

On the left hand menu in remote thumbs choose "My Templates"

This will bring you to a list of all your templates. Choose "Add Template"

This will bring you to a template definition screen.

The first thing the template screen needs is a name for the file that this template should create each day. Whatever file name we use here is the filename we will include in our tgp page(s) when we build it. For now, lets do a general purpose template and call it gallerylist.htm or something similar. If you wanted to do various niche specific pages then you would probably use a niche specific file name here something like lesbianlist.htm or some such.

The next question is how many rows and after that how many columns you want to produce. The file produced by this template is going to produce a table of the thumbnails available and will fill it as far as it can fill it to a maximum of whatever you put in to the rows and columns settings.

ie: if you tell it 10 rows of 5 columns you are telling the script to pull in 50 thumbs for this template. It is important to note that if we tell it 50 thumbs and there are only 20 available, we will get 30 empty table elements.

The next question is the scheduled time. This is the time each day for remotethumbs to update this template. I put mine for early in the morning just because there is generally less stuff going on on my server during the early morning hours. The time can be any time you want.

The next setting is the thub size you want to use, you can pick either 88X88 or 90X130, the choice is up to you and it can be changed later

Then there is a checkbox for thumbnail border. If you want a border around your thumbs, check it, and vice versa

Then we have url target. If you want the surfer to go to a new window when they click the thumb then click on the "_blank" radio button, if you want it opened in the current window then click self, if you want it opened in the top window cick tp. I reccomend using "self" thereby opening galleries in new windows while keeping our tgp page underneath.

The next question is the type of galleries, you can have remote thumbs pull in pictures, movies or both. This choice is totally up to you

And then the next question is whether you want hardcore thumbs or specifically softcore 2257 compliant thumbs. For now, let's avoid most legal issues and choose softcore/ 2257 compliant thumbs.

The next question is "url prefix" we will leave this empty for now.

Then we need to assign a settings file to this template. In the drop down provided choose the settings that we created earlier.

Leave custom template set to default.

Under archive options make sure that tenplate type is set to normal.

Go ahead and click on "save template". The template should be saved and we should now be back on a page that shows a listing of our templates. We now need to assign niches to this template. This will control the content pulled in for this template

On the screen, to the right hand side of our template filename, click on "edit"

This will bring us back into our template definition but now at the bottom will be a button that says "Select Niches", click on that button.

This will bring you to a "niche selection" screen. Click off all the niches that you want puklled into this template. If you want all possible niches (which we do) at the bottom of the scereen you can click on "ALL" and it will automatically check all the niches.

Once you have selected the niches you want click on the save button at the bottom.

This will bring you back to the template definition screen, click the save template button at the bottom.

This will bring you back to the list of your templates.

If you want to see how many sponsors you will be pulling from for this template, click on the "Template Sponsor" link nest to the template filename. This will show you what sponsors have galleries in the niches you specified and show you which ones you are signed up for. Remote thumbs will only pull galleries for sponsors you have signed up for.

You can now preview the output from this template by clicking the "preview": link. If you don't like what you see, then go back in and edit your template/niches/sponsors until you are getting output you like

Once you are satisfied with the preview output you can hit the "generate" link to actually run the script and put a thumbs file on to your server. This is a good test to make sure everything is cool before we go on to the next step which is putting the TGP page together

We will go back and set up archives a bit later in the project

Now, any questions

Starting tomorrow, putting the page(s) together.....