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A Family Collaboration Server?
esobofh asks: "I'm interested in putting together a server for my family that would allow everyone to share & store pictures, movies and music. Whenever we have a family gathering, there are always a ton of digital cameras out and clicking away, so I'd like to have everyone share and submit the pictures and movies they've captured for everyone in the family. I am sure I could roll my own collaboration server, but I'm hoping there is something already put together and pretty. I'd like it to use standard files and directories for storing photos (as opposed to a database), that way the files can easily be moved and manipulated. Is there an application that can handle user accounts, picture submissions (file upload via browser), and other such content?"
Gallery2 is nice, albeit a bit resource intensive when scaling down pictures to thumbnails using the 'convert' app.
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
So far we've gotten a recommendation for a Wiki and Gallery2. Both are poor solutions. Wikis are far too complicated to explain to most regular people who are not very technically savvy. Gallery2 is much easier to use but wouldn't qualify as a collboration server in the way the poster describes. Plus, Gallery2 has artifical upload limits preventing large home-made movies from being shared. I think the poster wants something analogous to SharePoint Services but most family oriented, cheaper, and easier to use. I, too, am interested in this.
Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but;
http://f-spot.org/
A really fast picture-collection browser. It sorts everything on date by the meta-data that your digital camera put in the files. You can add 'catagories' and the like yourself. Generate albums and such.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I was thinking the same, however, this would probably rather impractical for uploading videos. Also I've noticed the method for linking to files is somewhat confusing. I'm not sure if thats necessarily the best option.
;-)
But if a wiki were used, here's some info:
MediaWiki would be a good one, however it uses databases. Dokuwiki can be used to upload files of all sorts. It isnt very helpful in terms of creating a gallery of pictures however.
Here is a comparison of wikis: Wiki Comparison Table
A photogallery would be a nice wiki plugin to have
I use a gallery2 on my server. Check it out here : http://gallery.menalto.com/
I've been pretty pleased with it. Add in a wiki for letting other family members post miscellaneous stories and whatnot. I found it easy to setup, and it does everything I need.
Actually, didn't something like that happen a while back?
They sent a letter to Penn State astronomy department. They have a Professor Usher, who happened to have an mp3 of him and fellow astronomers singing or something. "Usher" and "mp3" were enough to trigger a warning message, but it didn't go all the way to a lawsuit, and the RIAA eventually apologized.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/
Features from website
iPhoto with iLife '06 lets other users subscribe to your photo libraries. Might suit your needs.
:ducks:
This too, will end.
Since most of the unwashed masses have Windows, you can use its built-in WebDav stuff. Set up an Apache server with a DAV directory. Then point your friends/family to the URL for the folder, which they merely need add to their "Web Folders." They need not know the underlying protocol to be able to use it. They can then just drag their images and videos onto the folder, and Voila! They are published. It's a no-brainer, and anyone who can drag an icon can use it.
On Linux, Nautilus can do DAV, too. I wouldn't be surprised if KDE had desktop support for it, also. DAV makes a nice small file server, when Samba or NFS won't work.
Perhaps this Ask Slashdot- "Multi-State Family Networking?"-from May 31, 2006 has some replies that will assist you.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
We use it to share Pics and Vids and Music. You just have everyone create a folder on their drive, then give each account permissions. They drop stuff in the folder and eveyone gets a copy via P2P. It's a bit of a pain to setup initally, but a snap to use once it's running.
Community Server is the largest PoS software around, unfortunately.
One of my favorite websites runs it (The Daily WTF), and there are continual complaints about it on practically every entry. One of the primary problems (improved, but still not completely fixed) is its mysterious ability to take a nicely formatted post, and end up automagically quoting all the < and > in the HTML view. End result is the preview looks OK, but the final post ends up a gobbledegook of HTML. Turns a nice post into an unreadable mess. It gets worse if people use different browsers.
(And some people complain it's a larger WTF than the WTF's that get posted!). It makes Slashcode look good.
On the upside, Community Server does look very nice. But the mangled posts tends to be a huge problem.
If you are going to go the route of hosting a CMS somewhere there are a number of other open source, CMSes that are also free, and are not limited in the same way Community Server Express is.
;)
My favorite is Drupal, as I've had lot's of experience using it, and I find it gives you the biggest feature set for your effort. The number of plug ins (modules) are extensive, and the end user experience can be whatever you want it to be. There are many Drupal hosting sites available that are fairly inexpensive, and have the shell of your community already configured. You just drop in your customizations and away you go.
Mambo is also quite useful if you're looking for an 'out of the box' 'set it up in 20 minutes and walk away' solution. I don't prefer it as much as the extensibility seems limited to me and it has some interesting quirks that seem a bit counter intuitive, but that may just be my inexperience.
There are many other CMSes out there, these are just two I have used/contributed to.
One additional comment : i find that picking a platform and setting up the technology is the easiest part of a project like this. The harder part is getting your family to use it!!