FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Xavi Tutusaus]

Dear FMFers, I would like to tell you all about a new feature that we have just added to the forum that is there to help improve the way the FMF Gallery ( https://www.topminerals.info ) works. I shall explain:

- Up until now, when you add a photo of a minerals specimen to a message, if you do not add any descriptive text it leaves the image a little less appealing and also means that there is no data associated with it when is automatically added to the FMF Gallery, so not mineral & locality, which would enable rapid and effective organisation.

- This new feature that we have added means that each image of a mineral (there is no need to do it for photos that are not of minerals) that is added will include the information needed to improve this, so that in turn the FMF Gallery can be perfectly sorted by mineral name.

There are 3 simple new fields that need to be completed that we have added when you use 'Write a REPLY', and between the 'Filename' and the 'File Comment'. These are: Mineral, Locality, and Dimensions. These fields, once there are filled in, will automatically appear as text in that order respectively in the 'Description' box of the published message.

This does not stop you adding any other comments you might have, which you can do in the normal way in the 'File Comment' field, it is just that by filling in the three new fields we will ALWAYS see the mineral name first, then the locality, then the size and thus will see the images correctly in order in the FMF Gallery.

I have attached two images of it, but if you have any questions please ask us on the forum and we will try to help.

Yours, Xavi

[Maxilos]

Hi,
If you do not know one of the fields, can you still post the photo?

Thanks in advance,
Mark

[Debbie Woolf]

I've just tried this out, I found out it's best to add the photo attachments first then add the required info after as this info disappears if you add it before the photo.

[Jordi Fabre]

[chris]

Hi Jordi,

Great improvement. It would be even better if beside the locality field, you could add a drop-list containing the list of localities already available in your database. So it would prevent locality duplicates whose only difference being upper-case vs lower-case for instance (an ajax getter would sort the list content based on the first chars typed by the publisher).

Christophe

[Jordi Fabre]

Absolutely Chris, but unfortunately the phpBB technology don't permit us to do it, or at least we don't found the way to prepare it. The phpBB font code is devoted to a Forum and although is a free font code and we can play with it, it seems it has a lot of complications to change it. When we touch something, another different feature becomes broken.
Is not a web page but a forum's page, and with its peculiar technology... ;-)

[Debbie Woolf]

[Jordi Fabre]

[Debbie Woolf]

Jordi, thank you very much for your time/happy hour, it's much appreciated.

The gallery now looks great & I will have to add more !

Thank You
Debbie