Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker
Manual: NP v8 manual p19
This neat addition to Portfolio v8+ can be a real boon but also has a few 'gotchas'. From v8.0 NetPublish offers two ways to publish catalogue information. The default, as previously, is to publish the whole of the current catalogue. The new option allows any custom gallery - normal or smart - to be published as a site. In the latter case a web user calling for all items in the site will see only those catalogue records in the source gallery and not the whole catalogue. This enables a single category to act as the data source for a number of discrete websites, e.g. to different customers. Meanwhile the Portfolio client users have access to the entire catalogue which may include per-customer records, records common to more than one customer and records not yet released to the web. With careful planning of workflow and metadata a subset of a project files can be automatically made available via website depending on metadata changes allowing records to match a smart gallery that is a website. Gallery-based websites really only makes sense using NetPublish Server. You can create a gallery-based site using uploaded catalogue but do note that the whole catalogue (FDB) gets uploaded, adding to the upload time, although it does function as intended.
Another benison of a gallery-based site is that it reflects (suddenly with NetPublish Server) the current contents of the gallery. This is where using Smart Galleries pays off. As soon as a record meets the gallery's Saved Find criteria it is added to the Smart Gallery and a web user refreshing their browser will immediately see the change. The same holds true for a record being removed from a gallery.
So how is a gallery-based site created? If you are used to the normal method of publishing you will find the 'publish' you will notice a NetPublish Assistant's last pane now has an additional drop-down towards the bottom. By default 'All Items' is selected. Open the drop-down and you can select from any of the current catalogue's custom galleries; these may be either normal manually created galleries Smart Galleries. The selected gallery is then used as the source of the published NetPublish site. If you now save your template set you must remember that the gallery selection is not saved. This is actually more logical than it might appear as the template set may be used with more than one catalogue and available galleries may vary by catalogue. As a gallery-based website is normally using this method because the records must not be used by the site a wrong selection at publishing time could be very embarrassing. There is a way to avoid this...
The correct way to publish a gallery-based NetPublish site is to use the client's 'Gallery' menu. From v8 this now has a NetPublish...' option - just like the 'Catalog' menu. Being called from the current gallery, NetPublish Assistant knows to set that gallery as the source gallery for the published site. It is as simple as that to avoid the above problem, over existing NetPublish uses it does require changing usual practice and should be factored in to any training for established users.
Is there a limit to the number of gallery-based sites that a catalogue may run? Yes and No. There is no limit imposed by Portfolio or NetPublish. However, you should consider the aggregate affect of the different sites. The main impact is on the web server and you should ensure this has sufficient 'horsepower' in terms of CPU and RAM. It would appear the loading on NetPublish is not significantly different whether publishing, for instance, 20 sites from one catalogue or 20 sites from 20 catalogues. It is the overall number of users at any time and the frequency and complexity of their searches that affects overall performance. As in a normal NetPublish site also consider the amount of work being done in re-purposing images, e.g. into previews etc.; increasing NP cache size can help with this aspect.
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Question: Using Gallery-based sites (v8.0+) [FAQ00397.htm]
Last Update:- 27 September 2007
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