Making Forums Image gallery out of IMG BBcode

Worker Joined: Oct 22, 2005 Posts: 201

Hey,

How hard would it be to collect all IMG tags a user has posted and display them in one page as gallery?

What do you think about this idea? Rolling Eyes

Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2010 10:15 am

Do a little analysis. You would have to define which tables are of interest. Stories, content, forums postings, reviews, whatever ... ? Then which fields within them are relevant: for instance the hometext field in _stories. Then you'd need to write a parser that would read those fields and accumulate img tags on a per user basis and probably store them off in a new table that you would have defined. I suspect there might be some gotchas in that, getting paths right and the like. Then you'd need "gallery" software to process that new table. And you'd have to write that yourself.

Probably, to develop the parser you'd have to sit with phpmyadmin and study the internals of how the fields are set up to store the image tags and deal with all kinds of exceptions.

Ultimately, I suppose it could be a cool module or capability to have but it would get pretty intricate first.

Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 5:10 am

Umm i thought about something simpler..

im talking about only the forums module.

the IMG tag is always using absolute path to the image, never relative.

Will it be hard to write something that will scan the forum posts for IMG tags per user and just display them in a page, change the width and height to display thumb image and click on the image will open it in a new window.

?

Thanks

Posted: Mon Dec 27, 2010 8:54 am

Looks like you will have to tie together (relate) the bbposts and bbposts_text tables. The links to the imgs seem to be stored in the text table but the userids are in the bbposts table. And the sample img tags that I can see on my system after a brief investigation do appear to be a path to the image as you say and they don't have any size information. They also appear to be bbcode (i.e., img with square brackets around it). I don't know the internals of how the bulletin board software translates that into "normal" html but you'll need to do something similar as well as adding height and width attributes.

And you'll still need to write a parser of sorts to go through the bbposts table, post_text field character by character and extract images and store them by user in your own new table. Not a completely trivial exercise.