Table of Contents
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.
This electronic book, the WACS Programming Guide, is designed to act both as an introduction to programming with the WACS API in either perl or PHP, and as a reference volume for both the API itself and the database schema. This book assumes you already have a basic knowledge of programming in your choosen language (PHP5 or perl5) and have some understanding of databases and in particular SQL (Structure Query Language). Some familiarity with WACS at a user level would also be a distinct advantage, and I'd 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. Given the relative youth of the WACS system, php5 has been selected for the implementation to save future porting efforts as it is expected that php5 or later will be the minimum common standard by the time Wacs reaches 1.0. There is no intention to support older dialects of php at this point.
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.
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 available for download from the WACS demonstration site at PinkMetallic.com - CAUTION: contains adult material! Access to this site is currently free but we may have to levy a small charge in the future if refferal and donations don't reach the hoped-for amount.