CMS with media content on another server

[Sandman]

Ok, so I'm the author of a pretty big CMS system (big as in huge, not
market-share big) and I've been thinking about a problem for a few
weeks here on media management.

The CMS accomodates both images/media uploaded by admins, but also by
members (in forum and blogs and such). Nothing strange about that at
all.

But now I'm faced with the need of moving - physically - all my media
to a separate server, for distributed loads. I.e. when deploying the
CMS you can either set localhost or media.exampel.c om as your media
repository.

This makes for two problems - as far as I can think of:

1. Upload

Upon surfing to www.example.com, and uploading an image - the image
has to be moved to media.example.c om after it has been uploaded to the
first server. Right? The media has to be moved first from the client,
to the www server and then from the www server to the media server. As
far as I can tell, there is no other way to do this. I have several
functions to handle uploaded files, the most important one is:

move_file($orig inal_path, $to_dir);

And to handle this, this function has to know when media server isn't
"localhost" and facilitate the transfer to the other server, maybe by
a second POST to media.example.c om?
2. <imgtags

The next problem is when the PHP script should output an image that is
physically located on another machine. Today, I use imagemagick to
convert it to the wanted size and geometry and saves it in a cache
directory and then outputs a <imgtag that points to this directory.

With the file on another server, the PHP script on the www server can
only output something along the lines of:

<img src='http://media.example.c om/img.php?path=/path/to/file.jpg'>

For example. And img.php on media.example.c om will do all the
conversions needed (in accordance to whatever size or geometry
specifications sent along in the IMG tag).

But, this isn't valid HTML. the <imgtag should always contain
width/height parameters or it will not validate. Not that my code
validates perfectly anyway, but I rather have this information since
it speeds up parsing by the browser as well.

Is there anyone out there that has done something like this before and
knows a good way to get something that isn't half-bad?

--
Sandman[.net]

[OmegaJunior]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:10:54 +0100, Sandman <[e-mail] wrote:

Ok, so I'm the author of a pretty big CMS system (big as in huge, not
market-share big) and I've been thinking about a problem for a few
weeks here on media management.

The CMS accomodates both images/media uploaded by admins, but also by
members (in forum and blogs and such). Nothing strange about that at
all.

But now I'm faced with the need of moving - physically - all my media
to a separate server, for distributed loads. I.e. when deploying the
CMS you can either set localhost or media.exampel.c om as your media
repository.

This makes for two problems - as far as I can think of:

1. Upload

Upon surfing to www.example.com, and uploading an image - the image
has to be moved to media.example.c om after it has been uploaded to the
first server. Right? The media has to be moved first from the client,
to the www server and then from the www server to the media server. As
far as I can tell, there is no other way to do this. I have several
functions to handle uploaded files, the most important one is:

move_file($orig inal_path, $to_dir);

And to handle this, this function has to know when media server isn't
"localhost" and facilitate the transfer to the other server, maybe by
a second POST to media.example.c om?

Have you thought of setting up a synchronisation mechanism? You could code
a directory watcher that periodically looks for changes in a directory and
then copies those changes to the remote system. You could do that
directly, but you could also use a synchronisation command catcher on the
remote system, that reacts for instance to SOAP XML requests and then
performs the commands locally. That way you can implement a security
mechanism to prevent abuse.

>
2. <imgtags

The next problem is when the PHP script should output an image that is
physically located on another machine. Today, I use imagemagick to
convert it to the wanted size and geometry and saves it in a cache
directory and then outputs a <imgtag that points to this directory.

With the file on another server, the PHP script on the www server can
only output something along the lines of:

<img src='http://media.example.c om/img.php?path=/path/to/file.jpg'>

For example. And img.php on media.example.c om will do all the
conversions needed (in accordance to whatever size or geometry
specifications sent along in the IMG tag).

But, this isn't valid HTML. the <imgtag should always contain
width/height parameters or it will not validate. Not that my code
validates perfectly anyway, but I rather have this information since
it speeds up parsing by the browser as well.

Is there anyone out there that has done something like this before and
knows a good way to get something that isn't half-bad?

Height and width are implied for html 4.01, meaning you can omit them
safely, and still have the document validate. The image element will then
be displayed at the size of its source, unless you control it using CSS,
for instance.

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

[Sandman]

In article <op************ ***@cp139795-a.landg1.lb.hom e.nl>,
OmegaJunior <om*********@sp amremove.home.n lwrote:

1. Upload

Upon surfing to www.example.com, and uploading an image - the image
has to be moved to media.example.c om after it has been uploaded to the
first server. Right? The media has to be moved first from the client,
to the www server and then from the www server to the media server. As
far as I can tell, there is no other way to do this. I have several
functions to handle uploaded files, the most important one is:

move_file($orig inal_path, $to_dir);

And to handle this, this function has to know when media server isn't
"localhost" and facilitate the transfer to the other server, maybe by
a second POST to media.example.c om?

Have you thought of setting up a synchronisation mechanism? You could code
a directory watcher that periodically looks for changes in a directory and
then copies those changes to the remote system. You could do that
directly, but you could also use a synchronisation command catcher on the
remote system, that reacts for instance to SOAP XML requests and then
performs the commands locally. That way you can implement a security
mechanism to prevent abuse.

Well - the media shouldn't be kept on server1. It should have no media
files. All should be on server2. So files uploaded to server1 should
automatically be forwarded to server2 instantly and then be erased on
server1.

2. <imgtags

The next problem is when the PHP script should output an image that is
physically located on another machine. Today, I use imagemagick to
convert it to the wanted size and geometry and saves it in a cache
directory and then outputs a <imgtag that points to this directory.

With the file on another server, the PHP script on the www server can
only output something along the lines of:

<img src='http://media.example.c om/img.php?path=/path/to/file.jpg'>

For example. And img.php on media.example.c om will do all the
conversions needed (in accordance to whatever size or geometry
specifications sent along in the IMG tag).

But, this isn't valid HTML. the <imgtag should always contain
width/height parameters or it will not validate. Not that my code
validates perfectly anyway, but I rather have this information since
it speeds up parsing by the browser as well.

Is there anyone out there that has done something like this before and
knows a good way to get something that isn't half-bad?

Height and width are implied for html 4.01, meaning you can omit them
safely, and still have the document validate. The image element will then
be displayed at the size of its source, unless you control it using CSS,
for instance.

Yeah, but it speeds up the browser to not have to wait for the image
data before positioning it on the canvas.

Either way, I've gotten this far:

1. Client connects to index.php on server1
2. index.php uses function img()
3. img() takes a image path from the database
4. img() sends a HTTP request to server2/img.php
5. img.php resizes original image at given path
6. img.php caches resized image on server2
7. img.php responds with "width height path-to-cache"
8. img() outputs a <imgtag with above properties
9. client connects to server2 to fetch the image

This way, only two PHP requests has been made, and one file request.

--
Sandman[.net]