Gallery Rewrite

[karlwilcox]

[Consider this issue a placeholder for a larger development and a comment thread to discuss it.]

Opportunity: The DrawShield Gallery is (potentially) a very useful resource - it is one of the few large on-line corpora (if that is the word) of coats of arms that contains both images AND blazons (and in many cases, titles). There are other sources that contain more blazons without images, and images without blazons but the DrawShield gallery has both. In addition there are blazons of all types, family, corporate, national, personal, fictional and fun! With a little work we could turn the DrawShield gallery into an very useful heraldic resource.

Current Status: The DrawShield gallery "system" at present consists of:

• Gallery Pages, one HTML page per entry with consistently formatted entries (apart from about 30 older pages), including clearly identifiable blazons and in most cases a title.
• PNG images, one per entry most 750px wide
• Submission System - built in to the DrawShield "Create" page
• Submission Moderation System - all submissions are received as emails, accepted entries are forwarded to a different addresss, others (duplicates, spam, not very interesting) are deleted
• Generation System - the approved emails are read by a build script which generates the images, creates the HTML page, regenerates the index pages, Stork data file etc.
• Upload System - currently manual, once per day
• Comment system - comments can be entered against any entry
• Comment Moderation - is email based, similar to the submission systems. Comments are held in a database.
• Voting System - Entries can be given a "positive vote". There is a crude filter to prevent multiple votes from the same IP address
• Gallery Entries of the Day - A cron job randomly picks 5 gallery entries to be featured in the side bar on every page and posts one of those to the Discord server
• Search System - client side using a JS package called Stork and a 23Mb(!) data file. Very fast to search but slowish to download.

Proposals

Over to you! Some of my initial thoughts:

• There should probably be a proper, server side database instead of static pages?
• Should we try to capture more "meta data" about the shields? (I.e. offer more than simple "Notes"). If so, what data?
• We don't really "promote" the gallery, other than saying "it's there if you want to use it". Despite this, some users have clearly put a lot of effort into systematically creating entries for particular categories (at the moment, someone is doing Portuguese municipalities for example). Should we actively be seeking more contributions like this?
• We probably need to set some rules / guidance for acceptance of submissions?
• And make it clear that this is not intended to be a "registry" (i.e. you can't "claim" arms by posting them here), it is just a publication resource?

Please post your thoughts and ideas as comments on this issue, or if you don't want/have a Github ID email your comments to [email protected] or DM @Artifex Scutum on Discord