As you know WACS is designed to allow for the management and presentation of a large collection of adult material, and as with any large collection there needs to be some level of organisation to how it is stored, if you are to be able to get the best results. Although there are many ways to find things within WACS, the actual underlying layout of the site is never obscured from the end user - it is part and parcel of the user experience. It is therefore important to pick a layout that works well for the type of content you intend to hold within the system.
Within the WACS tools, you can pretty much use any layout you wish with
directories nested up to arbitary depths - however WACS will naturally divide
them into three sections: the toplevel, the middle bit and the final container.
The toplevel directory, known as the area is stored in the
field of the sets table of the database called
sarea and so is usually known as sarea. The
middle level directory or directories is known as the category
and is again usually referred to by it's database field name
of scategory. The final container is only actually a
directory for image sets; for videos it is the actual file name of the
video file - since WACS started as a purely image based system, this field
is known as sdirectory. A number of the WACS tools include
appropriate manipulations to split scategory into two
distinct fields if used, but work fine if you simply leave the second half
blank.
There is quite a lot of complexity to how the final component, the
sdirectory is named which will be discussed in the next
chapter, Chapter 4, Naming Sets In WACS. For now we're going to look at the
various directory heirarchies that WACS can offer up as defaults and why
you might wish to select one over another. You are free to use any other
heirarchy you like, and we will discuss how that might be appropriate for
sites with very specific themes.
In illustrating how the directory tree is laid out, we will use a
tree diagramme in the style given above. In the above example, the toplevel
tree of the Wacs document area is called /images, but may
in fact be /home/wacs/images or any other similar pathname
that makes sense on your system. Just make sure the correct path is used in
the configuration file too. The next level directory is called
blondes, thus making it .../images/blondes and
so on down. Note that we will not normally show the actual image files in
the subsequent examples that follows, but they should be assumed to be
present at the lowest level. Note also that the absence of spaces in the
filename, the presence of underscores and the exact capitalisation are
both important and significant in WACS.
One of the most simplistic layouts is to simply divide up the models
by one key attribute and then by name, as shown in the diagram above.
In this case we've choosen to use hair colour, which will probably work
reasonably well for most sites featuring Caucasian (white) models and
expecting no more than 30 to 50 models in all. In this case the
sarea will be things like: blonde, brunette, redhead,
and dark hair. You'll probably find that the section for blondes is
significantly bigger than that for redheads, but that shouldn't be a
surprise. Of course, if you're running a site with a particular niche
like Oriental or Goth models, you may well find that you need to use a
different criteria for the sub-division.
Despite being simple, we'd not particularly recommend laying it out in this way - putting all the sets by a model in a directory named for her isn't really the best approach as you can always find those sets simply by looking at her model page. You also need to consider what you'll do if there are multiple models with the same name - We've seen some of the big sites with over a hundred models called either Maria or Jana!
When Wacs was originally developed, it was being used to collect
sets by selected models from a number of different subscription web sites
and it seemed logical to organise the sets based upon the site from which
they had been collected. This diagram represents that layout and this
type of layout is still very much supported by setting the
layout->vendormode attribute in the configuration file to
Y and the layout->style attribute
to modelattr. Additionally if using this layout, you
may wish to use the modified menu configurations described in the AppNotes
area.
The cornerstone of this layout structure is that the source site is the highest level grouping (the sarea). Underneath that we have combined the model's hair colour and breast size description into a single combined description. Generally this serves to divide each site's directory at this level into between 10 and 20 sub-directories, and even with a very large site (> 2000 models, 30,000 sets) this seems to remain reasonably manageable. Within each of these directories is a separate sub-directory for each model, and therein her set.
There are of course exceptions to this and over to the right hand side
of the diagram, marked out by a green box, we have the sapphic erotica area.
Since (almost) all their sets feature two or more models, focusing the
organisation of material sourced from there on individual models makes much
less sense, so in this case we use a completely different layout where we're
grouping by number of girls in the set and location in which it happens.
While the default system won't guess that much, it's absolutely OK to use a
completely different organisation structure as illustrated and it'll all work
fine. Notice also that whereas mostly in vendormode we're using two parts
to scategory, namely the model attributes bit and then
her name (as in blondes_smallbreasts/Chelsea), for the
sapphic erotica section we're only using a single level sub-directory
structure. So long as all of the image folders are at the same level within
the sub-directory tree, this works absolutely fine.
In summary, vendormode is a good site architecture, particularly for collectors who are accumulating works featuring their favourite models in a private WACS server. It is not as appropriate for a commercial site or one that is based upon a less collection orientated activity, and that is where our third standard site design comes in....
The final layout that is supported in the defaults mechanisms within Wacs is a gallery layout of the type favoured by a significant number of the existing adult web sites on the internet. That is not to say that these are the only options, they are merely those which are supported by the defaults mechanism within the existing Wacs code. You can easily devise your own layout in most cases Wacs will support it providing a few basic premises are adhered to.
In the gallery layout, the toplevel organisation is by the type of
content featured within the set; this means the toplevel will typically be
things like: toys, lesbian, straight, solo, and
masturbation. Essentially the top level sarea
is the same as the standard set type category. The next level down simply
consists of the word gallery followed by a three digit number within each
top level category. As each new set is imported into the Wacs system, it
is automatically placed in the gallery with the next available free slot
within the appropriate top level category. This method gives the opportunity
to view a number of similar sets from a range of models within the same
container which seems to be a popular and accessible way of browsing
collections. Of course all the sets can have links to the model pages
of the models featured.
Of course all the latest sets tend to be in the highest number gallery for each category, and a number of the Wacs tools include configuration options to show the latest first and in some cases limit the number of gallerys shown for speed of display.
Wacs provides a lot of flexibility in it's support for site layouts but unless you have a particular need for a custom style of your own, you are probably best off using one of the standard styles outlined above. Consider carefully what you choose as it is definitely significant labour to change the layout at a later date, although tools that can do it are provided. Generally it is worth choosing either the vendor mode or gallery mode; the simplistic mode will only really work for sites where you are hosting solely your own content or have a very specific scope of interest which will result in only a very small number of models.
Please see the configuration manual chapter on layout to see how
to make the selection of default values match your choosen layout. The
configuration variables you will need to tune are vendormode
and style. The next chapter will discuss
how the actual container directories are named.