etiquette/README.md

Etiquette

I am currently running a demonstration copy of Etiquette at http://etiquette.voussoir.net where you can browse around. This is not yet permanent.

What am I looking at

Etiquette is a tag-based file organization system with a web front-end.

Documentation is still a work in progress. In general,

• You must make the etiquette package importable by placing it in one of your lib paths because I have not made a setup.py yet. Rather than actually moving the folder I just use filesystem junctions.
• Run python etiquette_flask_launch.py [port] to launch the flask server. Port defaults to 5000 if not provided.
• Run python -i etiquette_repl_launch.py to launch the Python interpreter with the PhotoDB pre-loaded into a variable called P. Try things like P.new_photo or P.digest_directory.

Project stability

You may notice that Etiquette doesn't have a version number anywhere. That's because I don't think it's ready for one. I am using this project to learn and practice, and breaking changes are very common.

Project structure

Here is a brief overview of the project

• etiquette
  The core backend package.
  • constants
    Strings, messages, column layouts, and other things that are constant during runtime.
  • decorators
    Function decorators.
  • exceptions
    Exception classes.
  • helpers
    A variety of small, useful functions that wouldn't belong as a method on any class.
  • jsonify
    Toolkit for serializing the Etiquette objects as JSON.
  • objects
    Definition of the Etiquette data objects like Photos and Tags.
  • photodb
    Definition of the PhotoDB class and its Mixins.
  • searchhelpers
    A variety of validation, normalization, and processing functions used to handle search queries.
  • tag_export
    Toolkit for exporting a PDB's tagset into a different formats e.g. varying levels of nesting or depicting tags with their full qualified names.
• frontends
  Ideally the backend should be frontend-agnostic. Even though the Flask interface is my primary interest, it should not feel like it must be the only one. Therefore I place it in this folder to indicate that other frontends are possible too.
  • etiquette_flask
    This folder represents the flask server as somewhat of a black box, in the sense that you can move it around and just run the contained launch file.
    • etiquette_flask
      This is the package that contains all of the site's actual API code.
    • static
      User-facing, static, cacheable content like CSS, JS, and graphics.
    • templates
      Jinja HTML templates, including reusable subunits as macros.
  • etiquette_repl
    Preloads a few variables into the interpreter so you can quickly test functions within the Python REPL itself.
• utilities
  For other scripts that will be used with etiquette databases, but are not part of the library itself.

Contributing

If you are interested in helping, please raise an issue before making any pull requests!

To do list

• Make the wording between "new", "create", "add"; and "remove", "delete" more consistent.
• User account system, permission levels, private pages.
• Improve the "tags on this page" list. Maybe add separate buttons for must/may/forbid on each.
• Some way for the database to re-identify a file that was moved / renamed (lost & found). Maybe file hash of the first few mb is good enough.
• Debate whether the UserMixin.login method should accept usernames or I should standardize the usage of IDs only internally.
• Ability to access user photos by user's ID, not just username.
• Should album size be cached on disk?
• Replace columns like area, ratio, bitrate by using expression indices or views (width * height etc).
• Add some way to support large image albums without flooding the search results. Considering a "hidden" property so that a handful of representative images can appear in the search results, and the rest can be found on the actual Album page.
• Add a Photo.merge to combine duplicate entries.
• Generate thumbnails for vector files without falling victim to bombs.
• Allow photos to have nonstandard, orderby-able properties like "release year". How?
• Make the FFmpeg path configurable. Some kind of global config? Or part of the database config file? It's not like every photodb needs a separate one.
• Improve the appearance of album page. Too many section headers and the "Create album" interface should allow giving a title immediately.
• When users have '%' or '#', etc. in their username, it is difficult to access their /user/ URL. I would prefer to fix it without simply blacklisting those characters.
• Currently, the Jinja templates are having a tangling influence on the backend objects, because Jinja cannot import my other modules like bytestring, but it can access the methods of the objects I pass into the template. As a result, the objects have excess helper methods. Consider making them into Jinja filters instead. Which is also kind of ugly but will move that pollution out of the backend at least.
• Perhaps instead of actually deleting objects, they should just have a deleted flag, to make easy restoration possible. Also consider regrouping the children of restored Groupables if those children haven't already been reassigned somewhere else.
• Add a new table to store permanent history of add/remove of tags on photos, so that accidents or trolling can be reversed.
• Improve transaction rollbacking. I'm not satisfied with the @transaction decorator because sometimes I want to use exceptions as control flow without them rolling things back. Context managers are good but it's a matter of how abstracted they should be.

To do list: User permissions

Here are some thoughts about the kinds of features that need to exist within the permission system. I don't know how I'll actually manage it just yet. Possibly a permissions table in the database with user_id | permission where permission is some reliably-formatted string.

• Preventing logged out users from viewing any page except root and /login.
• Uploading photos (can_upload)
  • File extension restrictions
• Add / remove tags from photo
  • My own photos (can_tag_own)
  • Explicit individual allow / deny (can_tag_photo:<photo_id>)
  • General allow / deny (can_tag)
• Deleting photos
  • etc
• Creating albums
  • As children of my own albums
• Add / remove photos from album, edit title / desc.
  • My own albums (can_edit_album_own)
  • Explicit (can_edit_album:<album_id>)
  • General (can_edit_album)
• Deleting albums
  • etc
• Creating tags (can_create_tag)
• Deleting tags (can_delete_tag)
  • Only those that I have created (can_delete_tag_own)
  • Any time vs. only if they are not in use (can_delete_tag_in_use)

Changelog

• [addition] A new feature was added.
• [bugfix] Incorrect behavior was fixed.
• [change] An existing feature was slightly modified or parameters were renamed.
• [cleanup] Code was improved, comments were added, or other changes with minor impact on the interface.
• [removal] An old feature was removed.