Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

Overview
About This Book
About The Examples

Overview

Welcome to WACS, Web-based Adult Content Server, a free software package for the management of material of an "Adult Nature" (or basically whatever euphermism for porn you prefer). It is web-based and can be used for the management of an existing collection, as a download manager, or as a back-end system for running a commercial adult web site. It is dramatically different from most other image gallery systems in that it understands photo sets and video clips as basic concepts, instead of single photographs. It also includes far more specialised tagging, source, relationship and attribute marking concepts than other more generalised systems. WACS' abilities in the areas of searching and dynamic filtering are really industry-leading in their power and flexibility.

WACS primarily consists of three components: the main WACS web-based user environment, the Application Programming Interface (API) and the collection management tools. The web-based user environment will probably be used directly when WACS is used as a private collection managment tool and as a back-office site maintenance tool when it's used commercially. Most commercial web sites will typically use the API to access the WACS infra-structure from their own custom web pages, although there is no reason that they couldn't offer the normal WACS user environment either as an alternative for power users or as their main environment. Whichever of these options you use, the administration tools create and manage the collection then offered via either of these content delivery methods.

About This Book

This electronic book, the WACS Administration Guide, describes the administrative tools used to manage, catalogue and update collections of digital media (images, videos, etc) maintained within a WACS web site. It provides both a tutorial and a reference document for the various administration applications within the WACS system. The intended audience is WACS web site managers and support staff tasked with maintaining a collection within a WACS system. Some familiarity with WACS at a user level would also be a distinct advantage, and we would strongly recommend working through the companion user guide first - who knows it might give you some ideas about neat extra features you can add to your own site. All documentation for WACS is available both within the distribution and from the WACS Web Site at Sourceforge.net.

It is important to stress that ALL of the collection management tools are implemented in Perl and the PHP interface is an optional addition to, not an alternative to, the core Wacs system which is perl based. The php implementation of the WACS system API has always been targeted to php5 and requires a number of additional modules for tasks like database access. The installation guide covers these topics for those people working on platforms and distributions that are not available pre-package from the WACS download area on sourceforge.net.

As the WACS software package is Open Source, we're always looking for contributions; if you create a site design (or prototype for one) which you don't end up using, maybe you would consider donating it to the repository of sample WACS Skins. We can always substitute our own artwork into already written web application code.

About The Examples

For copyright/licensing reasons, the example images feature sets from photoshoots by the main developer of WACS (Beaky) and a friend of his. These sets are now available for viewing and download on our demonstration site PinkMetallic.com which went live in January 2010. Initially this site will be free to use, but we may introduce a charge at a later date to help us fund the expansion of the content or if changes in regulation require us to use a small financial payment to verify age.