bring back softimage.net

[grahamef]

I was thinking that everything should be categorized by what it does, so if it's a multi-xsicompound zip file or a .xsiaddon that focuses on Animation, it goes in Animation; if it does a bunch of things, it goes in General; and so on.

[Mathaeus]

+1 for tags instead of categories. At least, just a few categories plus "general".

[ximage]

so this seems to be going ahead.

how are you going about building this tekano. i saw something about google sites? i know i asked this before but have you built websites before? dealt with databases and what not.

the only reason i ask again is because building a website that will not put users off is a hard thing to do. it does not only need to have brilliant userbility, with well thought out pathways, it need to look very pleasing on the eye. we are so use to looking at well designed websites that are well thought out, that people can get put off easily. i know for one i do. if the site is not optimised right and becomes slow people will get put off. validated HTML code and Validate CSS is a must. website design is an art form in its self.

after looking on the domain name you bought i see you have a sort off holding page is up. please dont take this the wrong way but from looking at it it seems you dont have a top notch design eye.

its great that someone is trying this but i defo think it need to be done to the highest order for it to succeed.

on note for catagories you will defo need tags, plus over all catagories.

cheers

Daniel

[druitre]

...Most things do not fit into one category only and it becomes likely that someone misses an addon, looking inside the "wrong" category.

... which is exactly what happens in the compound manager, with my installed user compounds, esp. the ones that are not tagged/categorized (many of them aren't). I come across a problem, have a compound installed that will help me solve it, but because it's sitting in a 'wrong' category or has no task or tool name, I'll never know it. I've retagged most user compounds so I have a better chance of actually finding them.

In itself, the tagging system within the compound manager is brilliant - with it allowing you to assign multiple tags. The problem is more that each compound-designer can/will follow their own convention or logic. Or simply not assign tags.

Perhaps unavoidable. You'd have to have a brilliantly thought out naming/tagging convention installed straight away at the beginning and then each and every author would have to adher to that convention. Problem is ofcourse that there are many possible ICE-categories that we don't know of as yet. Topology wasn't one either, at the beginning.

[Tekano]

how are you going about building this tekano. i saw something about google sites? i know i asked this before but have you built websites before? dealt with databases and what not.
l

heh, I do appreciate where you are coming from Daniel, for code Im soliciting help and advice from friends who *do* and have written very optimised for the internets stuff. they advised, for me, a google apps business account as base from which to register the domain and build the web site from. As for how much needs to be coded fresh as to utilising pre built stuff provided by purchasable apps or open source tools Ive no idea yet but will know soon enough.

these guys are super busy and I aint paying them but they are old friends and willing to chuck me nuggets but I don't see how else is going to develop this site, so in answer, no, Ive not built a site like this by myself before nor do I know how to code one. But! I have been involved in at a project management level and worked with various companies that have deployed large scale web sites across multiple language regions so I do know what a database is and aware of some of the process involved. hopefully this website will be a modern fast access to one of these fancy databases Im not expecting to build a full on all singing / dancing / entertaining site that folk are going to socially hang around in or associate with cool...? just a lean, functional user driven database of all the Softimage ICE compounds that folk can download from and share with. Im not even promising this as yet unknown entity, just attempting it

Design, yeah sorry , I doubt its me to do this, the holding page its just a google sites template with a 5 minute in gimp jpeg slapped on top, I dont profess to be a web designer either, so sorry it offends ones visual palette but seriously havnt given much thought about it yet, only the functionality, and what will be available to me regarding this then I guess the design will follow. ! I was anticipating really simple minimal text and thumbnail tables like the original softimage.net downloads section, but that was vbulletin style & brown. and I wasnt too happy with brown back then either so once the wireframe mockup is tied up to actual achievable functionality then design can become an issue. I think a good layout is needed and folk who want to have a go at designing one or offer assistance to then that would be fantastic. Gustavoeb already has! good functional design is preferred over a stylistic or artistic approach, this will be subjective and tastes are going to drastically differ for sure.

and as for its success, well lets be realistic, this site at its very best is never going to get more than a few hundred users and I really dont see more than 10 or so of these using it at any one particle time. It needs to be simple and quick for those that do use it but as for some of your criteria... well im not sure 'top notch design of the highest order' are my expectations or requirements for sicompounds what I do remember from Art school mind was that form followed function, you appear to have them back to front! ;)

[Tekano]

@ druitre yes, was thinking about issues like this and I dont want to be strict and discourage folk from submitting due to a draconian submission form 10 pages deep and overly intense compound tagging criteria. its a balance I guess the submission form should hopefully make it easy to add tags and details to help to speed the process of which info to submit. but inside the compound and consistency of this with user named categories and tags... think its taking things too far perhaps? this wasnt in the original si.net section was it? for sure its something to be encouraged though.

Also I was thinking of colors of compounds as well. Do we really need to unify all ICE compounds with naming conventions, tags and colors for consistency? I can see without it could potentially very quickly get messy, but trying to instigate this might entail a whole load of tidying up of existing and yet to exist compounds which could take a lot of time.

unless of course there was some way of reading the tags, colors, categories from the .xsicompound and having the option of overwriting them from their more organised database entries. afterall they are only xml files right?

[EricTRocks]

Since this seems to be going ahead, some more advice. Don't design the interaction / storage of the data thinking that you can simply implement a database and everything later. You need to have quite a bit of foresight when doing this stuff. You're going to need to test, restest, and get quite a bit of feedback before you make this thing live and have it be successful.

[Letterbox]

Rob,

I'd suggest making it as uber simple as possible, one reason for google's success is it's simplicity. If fact why not duplicate it, like below.

If one 'searches' for simulation - you get a list of simulate compounds etc, formatted with div box's like rray's. (Use the mysql soundex function to aid in the searching).

The 'I feel lucky' gets changed to 'upload', select your file, then when done it takes you to (save as mysql user blob)

Then 1 simple page asking...
What type of compound is it? check boxes/radio buttons to define what type of ice compound (simulate, modeling, etc),
then 1 line asking....
What does it do? (text box for user description)
then 1 line asking....
URL for Vimeo / Webpage

Your in and out, an you've got what you want or you've uploaded what you've done, and it's quick.

And for you its not a huge maintenance deal, a big plus. Something to think about.

Then you can add what ever embellishments later. But you have core functionality, that people already know and understand and use daily ...ASAP.

[gfxman]

Rob,

I'd suggest making it as uber simple as possible, one reason for google's success is it's simplicity. If fact why not duplicate it, like below.

If one 'searches' for simulation - you get a list of simulate compounds etc, formatted with div box's like rray's. (Use the mysql soundex function to aid in the searching).

The 'I feel lucky' gets changed to 'upload', select your file, then when done it takes you to (save as mysql user blob)

Then 1 simple page asking...
What type of compound is it? check boxes/radio buttons to define what type of ice compound (simulate, modeling, etc),
then 1 line asking....
What does it do? (text box for user description)
then 1 line asking....
URL for Vimeo / Webpage

Your in and out, an you've got what you want or you've uploaded what you've done, and it's quick.

And for you its not a huge maintenance deal, a big plus. Something to think about.

Then you can add what ever embellishments later. But you have core functionality, that people already know and understand and use daily ...ASAP.

That's a very good idea. The compound should be searchable by name, by tag, by word in the description. this way, you can avoid the categories at all.

[Tekano]

thanks guys,

@ Eric, of course, in this case the design / storage will be based upon the structure and format of the backend database. I have no idea as yet how this will be as am still waiting on advise from friendly experts on how this is best implemented. Google app Engine http://cloud.google.com/products/?utm_s ... rch-global seems to be the solution on offer for my friendly experts to use some kind of Rapid App Development techniques in helping me to script the building blocks of a website together. It would be neat for us if Python was part of the backend solution, then perhaps some clever Softimage scripting folk could help too..

@ LBX for sure, bake a simple cake and add the icing later, this would be ideal if I wanted to learn how to build a website, I really don't! so my aim, if possible, is to have as little amount to code myself whilst trying to use simple but readily available solutions. it most likely end up that I will have to get hands dirty or learn new stuff but Its still early days , give me a chance, Rome was not built in a day

[Yanik]

If you want to develop a custom site from scratch fast and using Python, I highly recommend using Django.

Django is a MVC webdevelopment framework written in Python and it takes away many headaches such as writing and validating html forms, defining URLS, security. It also has an ORM which makes database queries really easy compared to writing all the SQL queries yourself.
What I really like is the Model implementation. Once you define a model class you can sync the database and put the whole schema in the database. You don't need to understand how a database works at all because it generates all the schema data for you.

Example:

Code: Select all

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
#first import all the stuff you need

class Compound(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User,verbose_name="User",db_index=True,editable=False)
    name = models.CharField(verbose_name="Name",max_length=100)
    description = models.TextField(verbose_name="Description")
    file  = models.FileField(verbose_name="File",upload_to="static/compounds/")
    published = models.BooleanField(verbose_name="Published")
    categories = models.ManyToManyField(Category,verbose_name="Category")

    # In templates an instance of this object will use the bottom unicode string
    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

    class Meta:
        verbose_name = "compound"
        verbose_name_plural = "compounds"
        ordering = ['name']

    # really simple query to get all compounds made by the same user
    def get_user_compounds(self,pulished=True):
        return Compound.objects.filter(published=True,user=self.user).all()

Getting, putting or deleting stuff in the DB is real easy.
Example view:

Code: Select all

def index(request)
    compounds = Compound.objects.all()
    # in this view you should also add functionality like filters where one could search by user, date, tags etc...
    return direct_to_template(request, 'compounds/index.html',{'compounds':compounds})

@login_required
def add_compound(request)
   form = CompoundModelform(request.POST or None)
   if(form.is_valid()):
        compound = form.save(commit=False) #it returns an unsaved instance
        compound.user = request.user
        compound.save()
        messages.success(request, 'Compound added successfully.')
        return redirect(reverse(index))
    return direct_to_template(request, 'compounds/add.html',{'form':form})

# pk is the primary key variable
@login_required
def edit_compound(request,pk)
    try:
        instance = Compound.objects.get(pk=pk)
    except ObjectDoesNotExist:
        raise Http404
   # Check if user is same user as compound uploader or if it's a admin member.
   if(request.user != instance.user or not request.user.is_superuser)
        raise PermissionDenied #Shows users to the 403 permission denied page if it exists, else it shows the default permission denied browser page

   form = CompoundModelform(request.POST or None,instance=instance)
   if(form.is_valid()):
        form.save()
        messages.success(request, 'Compound edited successfully.')
        return redirect(reverse(index))
    return direct_to_template(request, 'compounds/add.html',{'form':form})
   
@login_required
def delete_compound(request,pk)
    try:
        instance = Compound.objects.get(pk=pk)
    except ObjectDoesNotExist:
        return direct_to_template(request, 'compounds/delete.html',{'fail':True})
    instance.delete()
    messages.success(request, 'Compound deleted successfully.')
    return redirect(reverse(index))

Don't know if you have any web-development experience, but I hope it's clear how easy it is to build a small simple website like you're trying to, writing the backend would take a few days max if you plan it all ahead. Designing the html templates and css may take a bit more. I wrote all this from my head so I might have made some booboo's.
Django has user authentication built-in and it is very secure. You can also download modules from Django Packages to add functionality such as a captcha field or a module to upload images and resize them in your html templates. The docs are also really clear.

If you need help with it just ask, but I don't have time to do it all, if you know python and have some kind of web experience it is really easy to pick up. Maybe you can set up an open source community project, but I'm not sure how to set up something like that.

I admire your persistence, but I also agree on what others have said. There are a lot of factors which play a role in it's "success" such as usability, functionality, design and marketing before your lazy visitors actually do something. I don't think there's any model where you can gain some money of it so expect a loss from day 1.

Hi all!

[Tekano]

Yanik, way to go on your first post, Excellent! also your names rings a bell... but welcome and thanks!

I'm really glad that you posted this and helped re-enforce the fact for those that know what they are doing with something like Django or other Webdev frameworks its not such a big deal for a friendly dev to help me with implementing this little site. The fact you wrote it off the top of your head , well great stuff indeed, it makes me feel less bad about pulling the favours from my friends!

Im currently waiting for one of these friendly devs to come round for tea so he can help start to set up a lot of this stuff up, (he is at hacker camping atm https://www.emfcamp.org/ ) as I really do not have a clue, but until then I can attempt a simple hello world test app using django which does, I believe , come as part of the Python API for google App engine - which I have access to from within sicompounds.net

the open source.. yeah I definately want to open it up as it would be great thing - ' used by / built by Softimage users ', but let me get more details from my devs first (yes there is more than 1) to see what frameworks they would prefer to use.

[ximage]

Like i said i didnt want to offend and hope i didn't.

really admire you going ahead with it and hope it all does work out. when you are going to look for feedback on design and what not i will have our web guy take a look over aswell you give some good crits. if we are quiet and have some time we might be able to help out with design?

where form does usually follow function, it seems to work different in the web world from what i have found. it all has to be thought hand in hand as Yanik said usability, functionality, design and marketing all have a big factor to a websites success and to work best have to be worked on/ thought about simultaneously.

defo gonna keep an eye on this.

best of luck! ;)

Daniel

[Tekano]

hah deffo no offence taken Daniel, if anything just shows how much you care about this. Thanks for the offers of assistance, no doubt when the time comes, hopefully sooner rather than later, will be looking for feedback . tips & help so do keep checking in on this thread!

[Yanik]

Yanik, way to go on your first post, Excellent! also your names rings a bell... but welcome and thanks!

I'm really glad that you posted this and helped re-enforce the fact for those that know what they are doing with something like Django or other Webdev frameworks its not such a big deal for a friendly dev to help me with implementing this little site. The fact you wrote it off the top of your head , well great stuff indeed, it makes me feel less bad about pulling the favours from my friends!

Im currently waiting for one of these friendly devs to come round for tea so he can help start to set up a lot of this stuff up, (he is at hacker camping atm https://www.emfcamp.org/ ) as I really do not have a clue, but until then I can attempt a simple hello world test app using django which does, I believe , come as part of the Python API for google App engine - which I have access to from within sicompounds.net

the open source.. yeah I definately want to open it up as it would be great thing - ' used by / built by Softimage users ', but let me get more details from my devs first (yes there is more than 1) to see what frameworks they would prefer to use.

My name should not ring a bell, I'm not really a guy who likes to post, but I'm an active reader. Just wanted to chime in and help you, because I admire your spirit and want to see softimage's popularity grow.

I had some free time today and wanted to try out Macromedia uhm Adobe Fireworks, which I didn't touch over 10 years, to see if I can design something with the new version. I'm really impressed by it and this is what I came up with. I'll send you the fireworks file if you need it.

[Tekano]

wow that looks great! , I especially enjoyed the contributions from user 'someone cheesy'. likewise havnt opened fireworks for easily over 10 years but am recently on the Adobe creative cloud and noticed a whole load of web dev stuff that I didnt think was ever to have to use again but may have to. <-- originally a macromedia director 4 user before the internets existed!

I really like this layout you did, its simple, clean its almost blog like and is a very good start in the right direction. it seems with fireworks you can output some useable code (the find option toggles) as well as the png tables divided nicely.? And of course there must be more than one Yanik involved with Softimage, our community is not that small yet!

nice one!