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 is extremely configurable, making extensive use of configuration files written in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). This book will mention the absolute basics of XML in passing but it does really assume familiarity with the basic XML concepts of tags, attributes, and nested layout. If you have a basic familiarity with either XML or it's close cousin, HTML, you should be fine.
This book is a configuration guide for WACS site managers or web developers seeking to customise the WACS environment to better suit their exact needs. In most cases, a perfectly running system will be created by the installer script, and none of the changes described here will be needed in order to create or operate a WACS server. What this provides is access to the huge range of control and configuration options that WACS uses both in it's own extensive tool set and in applications developed using the WACS API (Applications Programming Interface) libraries which are available in both Perl and PHP languages.
To get the best from this book, you should ideally be familiar with the basic user interface of the WACS applications themselves - the WACS User Guide would be an ideal primer for this and should introduce you to many of the concepts and tools being used here. There is also no substitute for using a real WACS site to get a general feel for how things work and are laid out. We have a WACS demonstration site available at PinkMetallic.com - CAUTION: contains adult material.
![[Tip]](images/tip.png) | Tip |
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In addition as you work with this book, it will be distinctly advantageous to have administrator access to a test-bed WACS system without a live user community as many of the configuration options will directly affect the end user experience. |
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 our WACS demonstration site at PinkMetallic.com - CAUTION: contains adult material Access to the PinkMetallic.com site is currently free, but a small charge may have to be introduced at a later date if revenues from referrals and donations aren't as high as hoped for.