Help Customizing dfProHTML Export Template?

[Nanook]

I consider myself fairly smart, but the last time I played with programming language was BASIC. I have read the guides and tried to edit the HTML to my liking, but it either ends up looking horrible, or just doesn't display what I want.

If anyone has some spare time to help me out, by either some hand holding, or just directly making the changes to the template, I'd be grateful.

I love the dfProHTML template as it is really compact, but one click away from details. In the main view, the Director column is way too wide, the Writer column is not really necessary, and the extra horizontal space would be used to include columns for Duration, Media, # of Disks, Region Code, Video Format and my Star Rating. The Studio and Rated columns could be removed if the space is needed.

In the more detailed info view, gotten by clicking a title, I'd like to add the fields Country and Aspect Ratio, if there isn't room for those columns.

So to sum it up, I'd like the columns to go as follows:

(#) | Title | Director (1/3 of the width it is now) | Year | Genre | Duration |
(Country) | (Rated) | Media | # of Disks | Video Format | (Aspect Ratio) | Region | (Studio) | Star Rating

The fields in (parenthesis) are optional, space allowing, with the least important one being Studio, then Aspect Ratio and Rated, in that order.

I don't see any parameter for width of columns in the HTML code, so I wonder if resizing the Director column is even possible...

Thanks so much for any help you can provide!

[Nanook]

OK, I put my insomnia to good use. Took a crash course in HTML tables. It seemed that the id and class tags weren't really doing anything, and seemed to get in the way of the width tag, so I just got rid of them with no ill effects. I pretty much have it dialed in to where I want it, with the exception being when I tried to put the star ratings in, they made the lines too wide and it looked funny, so I just have numeric values in there for now. Feel free to check it out here: http://fzlives.com/Library

If anyone wants the edited html, as long as it's OK with Dan, the original author, and the big dogs here, I'd be happy to share it.

[Conor]

Excellent work. It's always hard to modify someone else's work as it takes just a few hours to understand it first. We are all about sharing and I am sure Dan doesn't mind either when someone improves on his work.

[sjk]

Feel free to check it out here: http://fzlives.com/Library

I give Croupier a 5-star rating, too.

[Nanook]

Excellent work. It's always hard to modify someone else's work as it takes just a few hours to understand it first. We are all about sharing and I am sure Dan doesn't mind either when someone improves on his work.

Thanks Connor! I'm now trying to make the columns sortable, but the Javascript I found doesn't seem to do anything after following the directions. Any tips? And correct me if I'm wrong, but to simply have the stars show up and not widen the rows, I'd need to shrink the star .gifs, right? And while I wouldn't necessarily call it an "improvement," it certainly fits my needs a bit better.

I give Croupier a 5-star rating, too.

Love that film! Whenever someone asks me to recommend a movie they probably haven't seen, it's one of my "go to" recommendations. And one more niggle: the movies that have a "0" rating, I simply haven't taken the time to give it a rating, rather than actually giving them a "0/5" rating. Any movies I would rate lower than a "2" don't belong in my collection.

[EDIT] Eureka! Figured out the stars! Looks like the "class" tag was again causing problems. Removed it, aligned the img to the bottom, and they look pretty good.

[Conor]

The class attribute was most likely setting a size for the image. You can also readjust image size with the width="" height="" attribute as well. Implementing sorting is quite complicated with a static HTML like this one, I wouldn't know where to begin. You normally need a database like SQL that can do the sorting for you and then PHP to layout the results.

[sjk]

Love that film! Whenever someone asks me to recommend a movie they probably haven't seen, it's one of my "go to" recommendations.

It had been on my wish list for at least ten years before I finally got to see it.

the movies that have a "0" rating, I simply haven't taken the time to give it a rating, rather than actually giving them a "0/5" rating.

Unless I'm missing something a '0' rating implies "hasn't been rated"; only 1-5 ratings are meaningful differentiating values.

Any movies I would rate lower than a "2" don't belong in my collection.

Since I want to use DVDpedia for keeping track of all movies I've seen there will be some lower-starred entries there. Most will be 3-5, with 3 being sort of an "unmemorably watchable" value. 2 is "'would avoid watching", 1 is "stopped watching or wish I had intolerable". The star system is too impersonally useful for large collections since it doesn't remind me why I (dis)liked something. Haven't decided where to add personal notes yet; the Comments field is usually already filled by a site search. Surprised there's not a predefined "My Comments" or "Notes" field for them. Considering what set of Tags could serve this purpose, but a freeform Custom field would be easier.

[Nanook]

It had been on my wish list for at least ten years before I finally got to see it.

Well worth the wait, I'm sure! I had to buy a Canadian import to get it.

Unless I'm missing something a '0' rating implies "hasn't been rated"; only 1-5 ratings are meaningful differentiating values.

Sure, but I just wanted to make sure. Now that I made the stars show up right, thankfully this is moot now.

Since I want to use DVDpedia for keeping track of all movies I've seen there will be some lower-starred entries there...Surprised there's not a predefined "My Comments" or "Notes" field for them. Considering what set of Tags could serve this purpose, but a freeform Custom field would be easier.

Ha, I just started keeping track of DVDs I've bought and didn't keep. Trying to avoid buying something again out of forgetfulness...

And can't you use one of the many custom fields for your purposes? You can even name them in the prefs.

[sjk]

Ha, I just started keeping track of DVDs I've bought and didn't keep. Trying to avoid buying something again out of forgetfulness...

A few years ago I had the sudden urge to see a Christopher Walken movie so I out and rented one, not immediately realizing I'd already rented/watched it a few years earlier. Fortunately the video store let me swap it for another movie since I'd returned it (with the "already saw it" explanation) soon enough after renting. That was the moment it became clear I needed external memory to keep track of rentals, as insurance against possible increase of similar "somewhat senior" moments.

I'm still making adjustments so it's easier to distinguish DVD rentals from discs I own. DVDpedia is ownership-centric, though the first DVD catalog app I've used that has reasonable flexibility for also tracking rentals. I've got ideas how it could be made more rental-friendly but they're not important enough to post about yet and I know Bruji is plenty busy enough with other things.

And can't you use one of the many custom fields for your purposes? You can even name them in the prefs.

Sure, which is why I said "… a freeform Custom field would be easier" at the end of my previous post. I'm already using three Custom fields, renamed Episode Name, Episode, and Season to better support imports of EyeTV recordings and iTunes playlists. It's possible more might be used that way so for now I can hold off assigning one to My Comments.

[Nanook]

DVDpedia is ownership-centric, though the first DVD catalog app I've used that has reasonable flexibility for also tracking rentals. I've got ideas how it could be made more rental-friendly but they're not important enough to post about yet and I know Bruji is plenty busy enough with other things.

I just am keeping a list of movies that I've owned and/or seen, that didn't "make the cut" so I don't buy them again. For now, I just have a new collection that I exclude from my library, and manually add titles only, not really needing all the details for "rejects."

Sure, which is why I said "… a freeform Custom field would be easier" at the end of my previous post. I'm already using three Custom fields, renamed Episode Name, Episode, and Season to better support imports of EyeTV recordings and iTunes playlists. It's possible more might be used that way so for now I can hold off assigning one to My Comments.

Guess I don't know what you mean by "freeform custom field," as opposed to a regular custom field. Didn't mean to imply you didn't know what you were doing!

[sjk]

Guess I don't know what you mean by "freeform custom field," as opposed to a regular custom field.

Same difference. Freeform meant any descriptive text, in contrast to a more strictly defined subset like Tags would be. I'm heavily leaning to the former because blurbs can usually sufficiently capture what I'll want to recollect later about a film, e.g. certain thoughts and feelings at the time. Tags seem useful for more specific purposes, e.g. flagging entries with bogus features I'd consider watching later. Effectively balancing usage of collections, custom fields, and tags is an evolving process. What's nice is that if something doesn't work out well with one method it's pretty easy switching to another, e.g. I removed one excluded collection in favor of adding a tag to all the entries and having them in the main Library.

Didn't mean to imply you didn't know what you were doing!

No worries; sometimes I don't.

I've mostly gotten the hang of entries being where I want/expect them to be, though it's still weird to me how some end up being in folders that don't contain any collections.

Uhh, what was the original topic of this thread?

[Conor]

Some end up being in folders that don't contain any collections.

That sounds like a bug where the folder entries are not being refreshed, to be empty. If you are still having this happen, please send us the database.pediadata file. If we can repeat it, it's almost always easy to fix the bug.

[sjk]

It's happened several times and I can probably make it happen again. Should folders only contain collections, never individual entries? I first noticed and reported the latter in my post with the screen capture example.

[Conor]

It could be that old bug we talked about, that if folders used to have an excluded collections inside and items where deleted from that collection they would remain in the folder. That has been fixed so you shouldn't have that happen to you with the latest version.

[sjk]

I don't remember explicitly discussing that bug but am glad to know it's fixed, whether or not it was the cause of my particular problem. Still hoping for an answer to this:

Should folders only contain collections, never individual entries?

Thanks!