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New Design - Gallery descriptions

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    PhotoDavid78PhotoDavid78 Registered Users Posts: 939 Major grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    So basically I have heard a lot about Full HTML not being supported the way it is currently. How will the new smugmug effect CSS and Java Script hacks?

    Ex. Fastline Media's Full Screen slide show, hiding breadcrumbs,
    gallerys four across, etc.
    basically the advanced customizer.
    David Weiss | Canon 5D Mark III | FujiFilm XT-4 | iPhone
    My Website
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    caroline wrote: »

    So what I'm doing actively now is:-
    1. NOT adding more photos, galleries etc.

    WHY? NOTHING we're doing in the future will affect any photo or gallery you add to your site.
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    carolinecaroline Registered Users Posts: 1,302 Major grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    Andy wrote: »
    WHY? NOTHING we're doing in the future will affect any photo or gallery you add to your site.

    Because I like to add html to my gallery descriptions and captions and I'm not aware as yet that this will continue exactly as is. Are you stating categorically that this is OK? By OK I mean that it will continue to work without me taking ANY action when the new format is implemented?


    Caroline
    Mendip Blog - Blog from The Fog, life on the Mendips
    www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+

    [/URL]
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    onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    EdBeck wrote: »
    I'm more curious about which phase of the overall dev cycle we're in. Certainly not Alpha, is this Beta 1 or Beta 2? God help up if this is a release candidate.

    I'd say pre-Alpha.

    EdBeck wrote: »
    Um, got any listeners? (I admit this is a cheap shot, but it was just laying there waiting for someone to pick up).

    Me. And everyone else here. :)

    We're just too busy implementing what we've heard to keep talking about the same stuff over and over and over... ;)
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    EdBeckEdBeck Registered Users Posts: 97 Big grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    Andy wrote: »
    WHY? NOTHING we're doing in the future will affect any photo or gallery you add to your site.

    The generic term is lack of customer confidence. When customers have been buying a product and all of a sudden they don't have any confidence that their purchase was a good one they go into hedgehog mode (Caroline - do you have hedgehogs in the UK?).

    Just be thankful no one's gone into lemming mode yet.
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    onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    EdBeck wrote: »
    Excuse me? I didn't hear you, I was too busy putting on my parachute.

    Planning migration isn't putting the cart before the horse, it's more like hitching another horse next to your existing horse. Well, it's not really like that either, it's more like your wife sitting next to you when you're driving on a trip, and she's constantly asking if you know where you're going (Caroline - I really hope I didn't just tick you off). And the really annoying thing is that you took a wrong turn about two miles back.

    This is actually a really good analogy. If you don't have a plan for migration there will come a day in the migration planning session when someone comes up with a great idea, but you can't implement it because remember back in July '11 when you had to decide between X and Y, and they were cost neutral? Yeah, well choosing X kinda made it impossible to implement this idea.

    I'm trying to make light of this, but that's simply because I have painful memories of migrating customers to new platforms because migration was always an after thought. I swear to you on a copy of "Light, Science and Magic" that having a migration plan in place, and making sure that at every phase of development the spec makes the migration bar, you will be better off in the long run.

    Migration should be assigned as a PM's central responsibility and not one of the lowly PMs that are interning with you, one of the more senior ones who has the ability to trash a spec if it doesn't meet the migration bar.

    We don't know what the finished product will look like yet. We're not planning migration until we're sure.

    It would have dramatically changed in the last week alone. Changed so much that it's basically like restarting. So I'd rather just not start.

    We're building the product first. Once it's built, we'll figure out how to migrate. As we're building, we have general ideas on migration, but since the product is a fast-moving target at this stage (we are pre-Alpha, after all), it's far too early to begin planning anything concrete around migration.

    Sorry if that doesn't sit right with you, but I'm focusing our limited resources on getting the product right, first and foremost. Until it's right, and most people are thrilled with it, we can't even begin to work on getting migration right.
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    EdBeckEdBeck Registered Users Posts: 97 Big grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    onethumb wrote: »
    I'd say pre-Alpha.


    Oh, cool. I'd say that you're ahead of the game on the customer feedback wheel.
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    EdBeckEdBeck Registered Users Posts: 97 Big grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    onethumb wrote: »
    Sorry if that doesn't sit right with you, but I'm focusing our limited resources on getting the product right, first and foremost. Until it's right, and most people are thrilled with it, we can't even begin to work on getting migration right.

    If you're pre-alpha then yes, it's too early for a migration POR.

    How about a few pillars then? For example, a couple pillars might be
    • Customers will not be required to do anything during migration.
    • Customers will have the same site functionality after the migration.

    Then when you review a spec one of the review questions would be "Does this spec cause customers to perform any actions (besides opting in) to migrate?" and "Will this cause any customer to loose functionality?"

    Since you're in pre-alpha I'd be happy with the ability to upload .htm files as long as I could designate one as my default file.

    BTW - it's good to start pillars with "Customers".

    Ed
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    onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    EdBeck wrote: »
    If you're pre-alpha then yes, it's too early for a migration POR.

    How about a few pillars then? For example, a couple pillars might be
    • Customers will not be required to do anything during migration.
    • Customers will have the same site functionality after the migration.

    Then when you review a spec one of the review questions would be "Does this spec cause customers to perform any actions (besides opting in) to migrate?" and "Will this cause any customer to loose functionality?"

    Since you're in pre-alpha I'd be happy with the ability to upload .htm files as long as I could designate one as my default file.

    BTW - it's good to start pillars with "Customers".

    Ed

    The *only* things we know right now is:
    • Customers won't have to do anything to keep their site operational as-is before migrating.
    • Customers with Advanced Customization will have to update it to migrate.

    I'm hoping that's all they have to do, honestly. Whether we can get there or not is something we're still figuring out.
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    alacraneraalacranera Registered Users Posts: 77 Big grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    Andy wrote: »
    WHY? NOTHING we're doing in the future will affect any photo or gallery you add to your site.

    Like Caroline, I've stopped all work on one of my two sites. If the functionality of HTML changes one iota, every single page on my two sites will be affected.

    I have too much time and effort invested in my primary site to abandon it immediately, but not so the other. I am not going to waste time on it not knowing when or whether the results will be tossed at Smugmug's whimsy. Andy, is that too hard to understand? Or do you want to YELL at me too?
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    EdBeckEdBeck Registered Users Posts: 97 Big grins
    edited June 29, 2011
    Can you please expand on this statement?
    onethumb wrote: »
    The *only* things we know right now is:
    • Customers with Advanced Customization will have to update it to migrate.

    Does Advanced Customization mean any HTML in the bio or gallery description boxes? Even an Hello World.

    Does Update mean recode to new files?

    In other words, I'd have to completely recreate this page: http://seniorphotosbyed.smugmug.com/Resources/MoreInfo/MoreInfo/17671689_2Vmrqv
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    SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited June 30, 2011
    onethumb wrote: »
    The *only* things we know right now is:
    • Customers won't have to do anything to keep their site operational as-is before migrating.
    • Customers with Advanced Customization will have to update it to migrate.

    I'm hoping that's all they have to do, honestly. Whether we can get there or not is something we're still figuring out.
    This isn't very confidence inspiring as this will lead me to either:
    • Shut down my site while I rebuild all my customizations
    • Hire a customizer to do this for me to minimize site downtime
    Either one of these paths will cost me a lot of time and/or money. I think this is what most of us are afraid of.
    Pictures and Videos of the Huntsville Car Scene: www.huntsvillecarscene.com
    Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
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    Green_HornetGreen_Hornet Registered Users Posts: 39 Big grins
    edited June 30, 2011
    I'm coming from the direct opposite direction: I may be a new customer, if the new design would be there.

    Until then, I stopped uploading to other sites. ;-)

    All the best to the SM geeks,
    Jan
    View my photos at janriggert.smugmug.com
    Feel free to leave a comment...
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    jasonscottphotojasonscottphoto Registered Users Posts: 711 Major grins
    edited June 30, 2011
    I'm more worried about html in captions. We use it in every caption. Fixing advanced customization is a one time deal. Fixing EVERY CAPTION ON THE SITE is a whole different story...
    Posts by Allyson, the wife/assistant...

    Jason Scott Photography | Blog | FB | Twitter | Google+ | Tumblr | Instagram | YouTube
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    CameronCameron Registered Users Posts: 745 Major grins
    edited June 30, 2011
    SamirD wrote: »
    This isn't very confidence inspiring as this will lead me to either:
    • Shut down my site while I rebuild all my customizations
    • Hire a customizer to do this for me to minimize site downtime
    Either one of these paths will cost me a lot of time and/or money. I think this is what most of us are afraid of.

    From some of their earlier communications it sounds like you will have the ability to rework customizations before going live with the changes on your new site -- no down time in that case.

    See this post
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    onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited June 30, 2011
    EdBeck wrote: »
    Can you please expand on this statement?



    Does Advanced Customization mean any HTML in the bio or gallery description boxes? Even an Hello World.

    Does Update mean recode to new files?

    In other words, I'd have to completely recreate this page: http://seniorphotosbyed.smugmug.com/Resources/MoreInfo/MoreInfo/17671689_2Vmrqv

    No, we're talking about the SmugMug feature 'Advanced Customization' as detailed here: http://www.smugmug.com/help/custom-colors

    Again, it's too early to be sure yet what else may need to be done, but those two bullet points are for sure.
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    onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited June 30, 2011
    SamirD wrote: »
    This isn't very confidence inspiring as this will lead me to either:
    • Shut down my site while I rebuild all my customizations
    • Hire a customizer to do this for me to minimize site downtime
    Either one of these paths will cost me a lot of time and/or money. I think this is what most of us are afraid of.

    Nope. No downtime is expected to be required. You and/or your customizer can work on the migration 'behind the scenes' and when you're sure it's great, hit the big 'Migrate' button.

    Bear in mind this is very preliminary, we're no-where near done, but I have a hard time imagining we wouldn't do it as I described.
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    alacraneraalacranera Registered Users Posts: 77 Big grins
    edited July 1, 2011
    onethumb, could you possibly be any more dense? EdBeck asked about the future of HTML [post #72], and you refer him [post #77] to old boiler-plate CSS info. There have been literally hundreds (thousands?) of questions asked about HTML, but I've seen not one answer so far in the last month.

    Is it the power of the collective smugmug brains "doing" and not "talking" for the last month that has led us to this magnificently detailed plan? [post #70]

    * Customers won't have to do anything to keep their site operational as-is before migrating.
    * Customers with Advanced Customization will have to update it to migrate.

    Id Est, there is no plan at all, except that the folks with customization will probably have to rebuild their sites.

    Y'all have been loathe to answer any questions about about HTML functionality for a month now, so I'll ask a different question. Given that this chaos of uncertainty about the future of SM is entirely Smugmug's doing, is Smugmug going to relax its no refund on cancellation policy? I want to cancel one of my accounts, but not if you guys just keep the money.
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    SheafSheaf Registered Users, SmugMug Product Team Posts: 775 SmugMug Employee
    edited July 1, 2011
    It's been almost ten years, but our goal then was the same as it is now: Build the best site in the world for passionate photographers.

    Photographers are a diverse crowd: some of us just love taking photos and don't want or care to make money off it. Some do it for profit, either on the side or as a full time gig. Some are interested in customizing and building out a website just the way they want it, while others want it done for them so they can get back to shooting photos.

    We dreamed, and still do, of building an amazing platform to accommodate all of those types. This redesign, if we do our job right, will make a massive difference for the photographers who don't do heavy customization. But we are also very confident that it will make things way, way better for you guys as well. I wish we could give you more details, but the best I can do is assure you that we're not dreading eventually releasing to you; we're very excited about it.

    Trust me, we love you. Many of you were early adopters. You have pushed us, sometimes kicking and screaming, to be the most customizable photo sharing site out there. So we came to you first for feedback on the design. We don't have all the details hammered out yet because we wanted to get your opinions before we went farther in the project.

    So please, let's keep the threads to useful and relevant feedback. We are reading every single post and we value your opinions. I promise.
    SmugMug Product Manager
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    onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited July 1, 2011
    alacranera wrote: »
    onethumb, could you possibly be any more dense? EdBeck asked about the future of HTML [post #72], and you refer him [post #77] to old boiler-plate CSS info. There have been literally hundreds (thousands?) of questions asked about HTML, but I've seen not one answer so far in the last month.

    Is it the power of the collective smugmug brains "doing" and not "talking" for the last month that has led us to this magnificently detailed plan? [post #70]

    * Customers won't have to do anything to keep their site operational as-is before migrating.
    * Customers with Advanced Customization will have to update it to migrate.

    Id Est, there is no plan at all, except that the folks with customization will probably have to rebuild their sites.

    Y'all have been loathe to answer any questions about about HTML functionality for a month now, so I'll ask a different question. Given that this chaos of uncertainty about the future of SM is entirely Smugmug's doing, is Smugmug going to relax its no refund on cancellation policy? I want to cancel one of my accounts, but not if you guys just keep the money.

    I think I've been remarkably candid. The answer today is the same as it's been all month:

    "I don't know yet. We're listening to you. We're working on it. Once we know, you'll know."

    I refuse to lie, make up answers, or hide behind "plans" that will change tomorrow. I wish I could tell you what our plan is, but it's still evolving. We like to engage customers *early* (this is pre-Alpha!) when we can so we can get it right. The last month has been massively illuminating, and we've learned tons. That takes time to turn into product.

    You're watching it evolve, I hope, helping to shape it. If you don't want to watch or help, go take beautiful photos and check back in a few months.
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    alacraneraalacranera Registered Users Posts: 77 Big grins
    edited July 1, 2011
    Fair enough, onethumb.

    I guess I've finally figured out that SM and I have absolutely polar communication styles. I'd want to have an agenda before I released news of a major shift in functionality to open discussion among (so far) 12,000+ customers. You've done it backwards, to my thinking, and have entertained the chaotic discussion before setting the agenda. The logistics of that are mind-boggling to me, but y'all have certainly been deliberate and resolute, so it must be progressing as planned.

    Your methods are way out of my comfort zone, but I think I finally understand, and wish SM well in this transition.
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    Erick LErick L Registered Users Posts: 355 Major grins
    edited July 2, 2011
    onethumb wrote: »
    You're watching it evolve, I hope, helping to shape it. If you don't want to watch or help, go take beautiful photos and check back in a few months.

    I don't see anything evolving. It's a one-way discussion. How am I supposed to help shaping it?
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    EdBeckEdBeck Registered Users Posts: 97 Big grins
    edited July 2, 2011
    onethumb wrote: »
    I think I've been remarkably candid. The answer today is the same as it's been all month:

    "I don't know yet. We're listening to you. We're working on it. Once we know, you'll know."

    I refuse to lie, make up answers, or hide behind "plans" that will change tomorrow.
    I've got to give you huge props for this.

    Everyone: This is a very delicate point. SM wants to share information with us, but they don't want to tell us something that could change. The reason is that to the customer it would be perceived as them having lied to us.

    Any software or services company can be developing a product, puts millions of dollars into it, and pull it at the last minute for a variety of reasons. I've seen this happen, literally millions of dollars spent on a part of a product which was pulled at the last moment in the release cycle.

    Onethumb's in a difficult position and as far as I can tell he's being pretty transparent, more transparent than he probably should.
    onethumb wrote: »
    You're watching it evolve, I hope, helping to shape it. If you don't want to watch or help, go take beautiful photos and check back in a few months.

    Just so everyone knows, I hosted a new domain two weeks ago with SmugMug. When I saw this thread I got nervous because the reason I hosted at SM was the customization I could do. Since I was within 30 days of buying the new account I looked around to see if there was another site that I'd like to host my domain. I've spent the last week looking at other hosters and even built out a test site on one of them.

    After much thought I've decided to stay with SmugMug. This thread has shown me that they care about their customers, and I don't think that they'd do anything to ruin the relationship. The least I can do is stick around and give feedback.

    Ed Beck
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    anglotexiananglotexian Registered Users Posts: 40 Big grins
    edited July 4, 2011
    I may be a little late joining this discussion, but having spent countless hours making my site look and work the way I want, I am extremely apprehensive about the proposed changes.

    My gallery descriptions generally act as a multi-paragraph introduction to a photo essay. I don't want "more" to be an option, I need it to be the default. At least allow us to set the toggle default in gallery settings.

    It's very important for me to be able to include html in the description (in captions also).

    Description text in the current "test" is horribly truncated and appears double-spaced. Please tell me this is not the way it's going to look in the final version.

    I'm all for making the "engine" work more efficiently, but not if it destroys the look & feel that I have created with the old one.
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    RuSuRuSu Registered Users Posts: 355 Major grins
    edited July 12, 2011
    A non-pro's input...
    My SM account is about to expire & I was debating whether to redesign my site or switch to Zenfolio. The thought of redesigning on SM fills me with dread so I decided to check out DGrin's Customization thread, which is how I heard about the upcoming changes. Generally, I'm glad to see change coming. Yes, SM needs to step it up a notch - to look slicker & more sophisticated. Sure, the pros & programmers have sites as striking & beautiful as anywhere on the web, but the customization required to get that look is mind boggling to amateurs & non-programmers. I checked out Zenfolio & the looks, layouts & ease of use beat SM by far (someone in one these 'changes' threads posted a Zenfolio web site & it just has so much more impact that what us 'commoners' can do on SM). On the other hand, I've now been with SM for 2yrs. The Smug heroes have a great response time, the Dgrin customizer volunteers (John Friend, Allen, et.al.) are terrific & I enjoy the SM communities - all reasons to stick with SM.

    I do agree that bigger thumbnails are better & there should be ore choices as to how they're organized/presented; the featured photo needs to be bigger (if the client opts for it) & be able to be placed right or left. Visually, I like the dots indicating what page in a gallery someone is on, but am afraid it's a case of design not meeting function - too many people simply won't get it.

    I've read too much for tonight & it's late here in Moscow. I've decided to stick with SM & hold off on a redesign on our site until the new changes come out (hopefully sooner than later - pre-alpha sounds awfully far off) & I hope SM will have extra staff on board to help everyone through the transition.

    Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

    Susan
    rusuphotography.com
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    Erick LErick L Registered Users Posts: 355 Major grins
    edited August 9, 2011
    - HTML in Captions, Descriptions, etc. To make this new design work properly, we had to get a little more aggressive about what can and cannot belong in places like photo Captions. Basic formatting, like colors, still works (and as I said above, we're building a tool to facilitate that even better than we do now), but potentially page-destroying HTML isn't anymore.

    Could you elaborate on that, please? I have a bilingual website with html code in almost every caption. If you scrap that, that means removing hundreds or thousands of coding one by one. It would be easier to start from scratch here or elsewhere than fix all that code.
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    carolinecaroline Registered Users Posts: 1,302 Major grins
    edited August 9, 2011
    Erick L wrote: »
    Could you elaborate on that, please? I have a bilingual website with html code in almost every caption. If you scrap that, that means removing hundreds or thousands of coding one by one. It would be easier to start from scratch here or elsewhere than fix all that code.

    I'm sure there are many of us who would like a definitive answer to this particular issue and it's now over a month since the last contribution here from SmugMug. I've pretty much lost interest in my site here, what's the point in adding new galleries etc? I did upload some pics a couple of days ago and the captions have some html in them, so how much longer do we have to wait before you give us an answer? I've got a very smart template in Wordpress and the ability to create attractive galleries etc, I might as well put the effort in there rather than here.

    My subscription runs out in December and I wont be renewing if there is no satisfactory answer to the important points raised in these threads.

    Caroline
    Mendip Blog - Blog from The Fog, life on the Mendips
    www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+

    [/URL]
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    Erick LErick L Registered Users Posts: 355 Major grins
    edited August 9, 2011
    My subscription is due in october and this worries enough that I created an account elsewhere in case my SM site goes fubar.
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 9, 2011
    Erick L wrote: »
    Could you elaborate on that, please? I have a bilingual website with html code in almost every caption. If you scrap that, that means removing hundreds or thousands of coding one by one. It would be easier to start from scratch here or elsewhere than fix all that code.

    Can't elaborate yet - but I can tell you this: we would never harm a customer with code like you've got - we'd always do the right thing. Stay tuned.
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    SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited August 10, 2011
    Cameron wrote: »
    From some of their earlier communications it sounds like you will have the ability to rework customizations before going live with the changes on your new site -- no down time in that case.

    See this post
    onethumb wrote: »
    Nope. No downtime is expected to be required. You and/or your customizer can work on the migration 'behind the scenes' and when you're sure it's great, hit the big 'Migrate' button.

    Bear in mind this is very preliminary, we're no-where near done, but I have a hard time imagining we wouldn't do it as I described.
    Thank you both for the replies. Well, this alleviates my fears only somewhat. I mean, it took me over a week to customize my site the way I wanted when I had free time. Now that I'm knee deep in my busy season, I'd need easily two months or more. And I have a feeling that would just not fit with SM's transition schedule.
    Pictures and Videos of the Huntsville Car Scene: www.huntsvillecarscene.com
    Want faster uploading? Vote for FTP!
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