Using API to control user experience - how flexible?
winglet
Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
hi everyone!
I have spent several hours poking around the forums :scratch and I apologize if this has been covered elsewhere but even tweaking the search function I haven't been able to figure out if I can use the API to do what I want to do. (Amateur coder with just enough knowledge to make a big mess...:thumb)
I've been playing with smugmug and am totally impressed. I am preparing to add a photo gallery section to my ExpressionEngine-run blog, and while this excellent CMS has a great built-in photo gallery function, I have decided to use smugmug to do all the photo "heavy lifting". I simply can't touch the power, slideshow, and backup capabilities of smugmug. And the fact the owners are apparently Mac afficianados...well, you had me at hello!:bow
Quick background. ExpressionEngine has amazingly detailed user/group access controls, which allows you to use simple tags to control which users/groups see what content. I am trying to extend this functionality to smugmug galleries, albeit in a much simplified manner.
My question: Is there any way to use the API to unlock password-protected albums?
What I would like to achieve is, if someone accessed "mysite.smugmug.com" directly, they wouldn't see any content. (Assuming I hid and password-protected all the albums, which is simple.) I would then create a link on my site, say "Photos", it would call a script that would direct to "mysite.smugmug.com", and (hopefully) enter the correct pasword to reveal hidden, password-protected albums. From what I have read, if you assign the same password to several albums you can see all of those albums when you login with that password once. Thus, by relating the smugmug password to the user id's from my site, you could selectively control what albums each viewer sees. I was considering writing an EE module to simplify this, to relate smugmug album passwords to EE user/group id's. But before I do that I need to figure out if this is possible on the smugmug side.
It isn't so much about keeping photos hidden (although, there are probably some it would be nice to keep EVERYONE from seeing...) It's more about trying to customize the individual user's experience, and delegate the access control to a different site's permission set.
I do realize you can login to smugmug with the API to retrieve content from the database to display or do what you want with elsewhere. That is not what I am talking about - my whole point is to use the smugmug site's awesome capabilities for displaying photos. But I am not talking about logging in as the owner, just revealing particular albums. I'm just a little fuzzy on what the API login features allow - it really wouldn't be great if every visitor to my blog had, for example full administrative powers for my smugmug site!
I hope that made sense, sorry it's so long-winded. If anyone understands my goal could they tell me if it's possible?
I have spent several hours poking around the forums :scratch and I apologize if this has been covered elsewhere but even tweaking the search function I haven't been able to figure out if I can use the API to do what I want to do. (Amateur coder with just enough knowledge to make a big mess...:thumb)
I've been playing with smugmug and am totally impressed. I am preparing to add a photo gallery section to my ExpressionEngine-run blog, and while this excellent CMS has a great built-in photo gallery function, I have decided to use smugmug to do all the photo "heavy lifting". I simply can't touch the power, slideshow, and backup capabilities of smugmug. And the fact the owners are apparently Mac afficianados...well, you had me at hello!:bow
Quick background. ExpressionEngine has amazingly detailed user/group access controls, which allows you to use simple tags to control which users/groups see what content. I am trying to extend this functionality to smugmug galleries, albeit in a much simplified manner.
My question: Is there any way to use the API to unlock password-protected albums?
What I would like to achieve is, if someone accessed "mysite.smugmug.com" directly, they wouldn't see any content. (Assuming I hid and password-protected all the albums, which is simple.) I would then create a link on my site, say "Photos", it would call a script that would direct to "mysite.smugmug.com", and (hopefully) enter the correct pasword to reveal hidden, password-protected albums. From what I have read, if you assign the same password to several albums you can see all of those albums when you login with that password once. Thus, by relating the smugmug password to the user id's from my site, you could selectively control what albums each viewer sees. I was considering writing an EE module to simplify this, to relate smugmug album passwords to EE user/group id's. But before I do that I need to figure out if this is possible on the smugmug side.
It isn't so much about keeping photos hidden (although, there are probably some it would be nice to keep EVERYONE from seeing...) It's more about trying to customize the individual user's experience, and delegate the access control to a different site's permission set.
I do realize you can login to smugmug with the API to retrieve content from the database to display or do what you want with elsewhere. That is not what I am talking about - my whole point is to use the smugmug site's awesome capabilities for displaying photos. But I am not talking about logging in as the owner, just revealing particular albums. I'm just a little fuzzy on what the API login features allow - it really wouldn't be great if every visitor to my blog had, for example full administrative powers for my smugmug site!
I hope that made sense, sorry it's so long-winded. If anyone understands my goal could they tell me if it's possible?
0
Comments
You can't use the API to limit what someone sees if they navigate directly to the SmugMug site, but if you wanted to write a front-end to SmugMug from your blog and display content from SmugMug, then yes, you could filter what the user saw.
Did that help?
kallasoft | The "Break It Down" Blog
Yeah, it did answer my question, but unfortunately to tell me that I cannot achieve what I'm looking for with smugmug.
I am aware of the ability of the API to pull content from SmugMug for use in another site, a good example of that is here (using ExpressionEngine in fact, code is here). So I do get that.
But I did want to do exactly what you described, limit what someone sees if they navigate directly to the smugmug site. I could come up with some sort of clumsy workaround involving hidden password-protected galleries but I was hoping for somehing more elegant. C'est la vie, I will stick with the built-in galleries of ExpressionEngine.