I playing around with Total CMS for a week now. It’s a awesome product, one of the best releases this year.
As a brand new product it has very useful stack options - a thoughtful work. I hope that it will continue to evolve, therefore a few things I noticed.
I work with pictures and therefore I ask for some features.
The admin image and gallery stacks are abele auto resize an picture upload to a max. size and also create a small thumbnail and a square thumbnail too. That is great for the most of times and make galleries and page loads lightning fast. The problem is if the source upload is a perfect web optimized picture. In this case the new picture don’t look so well as it was before. A simple checkbox for deselect the resize option would be helpful to keep the original image quality. I tested a lot of setting to solve this but I doesn’t really help.
The gallery display stack has two options to display the grid: thumbnail and (square)thumbnail
If the gallery contains landscape and portrait images, the thumbnail grid view don’t look good, because you see rows with a different hight. The square grid view looks ugly too, because a portrait of a bride, would have a cuttet head an feet. For this kind of galleries a third option would be great, that shows the thumbnail centered inside a square box. So you have a nice looking grid and see also the full picture.
Last thing is the slideshow stack. At galleries I can choose the option shuffle that I miss at slideshows.
If the image is smaller than the maximum, then the image will not get resized. So you just need to ensure that the image is already sized properly. In terms of image quality, remember that you can also adjust the Image Quality setting to adjust the compression of the image. This will affect the sharpness of the image.
I will see what I can do about making mixed image galleries look better.
Thanks, that what I find out and use now…
One more thing: if I upload lets say 100 images to a gallery, the server start resize and create the thumbnails, but more as 10% are marked red - these images are damaged. If I delete this images, the whole gallery is confused, because the damaged images are still visible at the lightbox, but not in the thumbnail row. I think this is a server problem. Maybe the server need more time between each image.
Upload images individually is real boring as well as delete a gallery image by image if the gallery is confused. At the moment I delete the Gallery folder by using FTP.
That would be great. I did upload 800 images last night one image at a time and had to delete some double uploads. Now all galleries are complete out of sync. At the admin site these pictures are deleted, but at the gallery still visible as well as at the lightbox view, but not at the thumbnail row. Really confusing.
So I stopt working with CMS until this is fixed, because I had a a couple of thousand pictures that I like to upload.
I had a similar problem with only 6 images, deleted a couple added a couple and could only see the previous images, I deleted the lot, started again seemed to work. Not quite the same as 800 though.
the 800 pictures are splittet in 22 galleries. Last week I did some tests with small galleries and added and deleted a lot of times and did not notice this effect.
sorry I talk about the animation transmission speed. The slide duration change, but the transmission (animation) between each slide don’t change. I set it to 2000 ms, but it looks still like 500 ms or less. Other slideshow stacks have a nice, smooth transition with a setting over 1000 ms. If I place Joe Workmans MovinBox 2, my favorite slider, at the same site, it looks great.
Now I viewed the slideshow also with Chrome and Firefox. At Safari the Slideshow has no, or a not visible transition between the slides. At Chrome it looks very strange - not a transition, its more like seeing two pictures the same time for a moment and at Firefox it is perfect, they way it should be.
I’m still wondering that other slideshows are beautiful at safari at the same moment.
I haven’t taken a crack at Total CMS yet, it’s on my to-do list. But I’ve just been asked to create a CMS site for a client, a painter. He wants simplicity which makes me think Total CMS will be a perfect solution…
He wants to divide his artwork into categories, possibly pages, and then add new paintings as and when. I understand that adding new art won’t be an issue, but does Total CMS allow the user to add new pages or subpages to an existing site?
I still have the problem that a gallery is confused as soon as a image was deleted.
I did build a slideshow with 2 images as a placeholder. Now I deleted the placeholder images and add about 15 images for the final slideshow. The placeholder images are not visible at the slideshow, but now again visible at the admin page. The first 2 images I added are not visible at the admin site but visible at the slideshow.