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
	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.

<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<config>
 <colours>
  <foreground>#0000D0</foreground>
  <background>#FFFFB0</background>
 </colours>
</config>

The above example is actually a valid WACS configuration file which will specify that most of the text is a bright blue and the standard background is a bright yellow. Not probably the most sutble or desirable of colour schemes, but the significant difference in brightness between the two colours used should at least render it very readable.

Let's work through this line by line - the top line is simply a designation that this is an XML file and conforms to version 1.0 of the XML specification. You need it to be there for it to be recognised as XML but you'll never need to change it. The second line states that we're starting a config file, which we do with what's known as an open tag which consists in the word bracketed by less than (<) and greater than (>) symbols. It absolutely must be matched by a partner close tag which consists of the same word prefixed by a standard forward slash (/) character still surrounded in a pair of less than/greater than brackets. This means that the <config> must be matched by a </config> at the end. Since it starts first, config is considered the outermost element - the diagram below may help you visualise it.

Figure 2.1. Logical Structure

Within the overall class of config, we have a second level element called <colours>. In fact, it is one of many such that you will see when looking at WACS XML files. Within the section <colours> we have two attribute elements foreground and background. Each of these has an attribute, in this case a colour specified in the standard HTML RGB notation - these should be instantly recognisable to most web developers and designers. These attributes are simply enclosed within the open (eg <foreground>) and (eg </foreground>) close tags of the attribute.

Tip

The topic of colour selection is a complex one we can't really cover here. The key points are that the colours you choose shouldn't clash but should be sufficiently different from each other as to make the text stand out from the background enough to be easily readable. A web search for "web safe colours" should give you some useful links - a good starting point would be The Wikipedia Web Colors page.

For any web-based application to be successfully deployed, one of the most important things is that the webserver be reachable on a reliable URL. This is unfortunately not as straight forward as it sounds as in most other fields of activity, networked computers just work fine if allocated the next available network address. This is not the case with web servers. The first step then to getting a host configured to be a web server is to ensure it will always appear as the same name on the same IP (network) address each time it boots up.

In a typical home or small office network, the network router box (ADSL or Cable router) can be configured to do this for you. The first step is to determine the ethernet address of the host concerned; you can do this with the ifconfig command when run as root or by using sudo to run with the necessary priviledge. It is usually best to specify the relevant network interface which will usually be the first ethernet interface, usually known as eth0 (in some newer distributions this is known as em1 or other names - if in doubt, check the documentation for your distribution).

The output should look something like this:

# ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:2F:54:86:D5  
          inet addr:192.168.1.10  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::211:2fff:fe54:86d5/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:100576 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:79057 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:64722164 (61.7 MiB)  TX bytes:51569420 (49.1 MiB)
          Interrupt:17 

#

You need the HWaddr which in this case is 00:11:2F:54:86:D5. Log into the administrative interface of your router, and look for either DNS or LAN settings; you should be able to find an option here to reserve an address for a specific machine. You need to pick a name and an IP address to be allocated to it; most home networks use the Class-C non-routed address range which means the network numbers start 192.168. - your router will have probably choosen either 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 for it's own address. You need to stick to whatever the router has choosen for the first three couplets of numbers as that will be your local network number. Lets assume we want to call the server nemesis, then we'd be looking to enter the following into the network number reservation list in the router configuration.

	Warning
	Depending upon the ADSL/Cable router design you may also want to specify your internet domain and you may need to modify the automatically allocated address range it uses to avoid conflicts. You'll have to refer to the manual for the router to determine this.

You may additionally want to set the hostname within the operating system itself to the same name, and you might want to fix the address in the server's own configuration to make it come up on that network address even if the ADSL/Cable router is down when it reboots. How this is done varies even between Linux distributions, so you will have to refer to the documentation of your particular distribution on how to do this.

You will probably also want to ask your Internet Service Provider for a number of specific changes to be made to your account. The minimum you almost certainly want to ask for is "a static IP address" - this means that whenever your ADSL router makes a request for an Internet address to be allocated to it, it will always be given the same one. If you don't want to let on what it's actually for, and remember that a WACS server may well be holding content in violation of their terms and conditions of service, you can say that your employer wants to know a fixed network address to add to their security access list in order to allow you to access their corporate network from home.

Warning

This terms and conditions thing is annoying. If you have your WACS system secured so that only people with passwords you've issued them can access it, your ISP will probably never know and to some extent it's an invasion of privacy for them to dictate to you what you may or may not do with your own system. Do remember that WACS is released in the public domain in the hope that it will be useful, but the license explicitly disclaims liability for any damages caused through it's malfunction or use. It's not impossible that some bug in our security code might now or at some point in the future expose your collection unintentionally. You have got to understand that that risk is on your head if you make your server accessible to the internet. Quite apart from this be wary of throwing it open to general access as people from netnanny services hunting down sources of unsuitable material could end up blacklisting their whole IP address range with serious commercial consequences for them and other mainstream web sites hosted by them. In that situation they'll have a genuine grievance with you and may well come after you with lawyers which is usually pretty nasty...

Tip

While talking to your ISP, it's worth saying to them that you wish to access files on your system from outside, for your personal use only, and that you'd like to know if any protocols or port numbers are blocked at their firewall. Many (unfortunately) block http, but you can always move the actual port number used by your WACS web server to a different one, providing you know that you're going to have to.

The second thing that is useful is a standard domain name for your home network; this can be a domain name you've bought or merely a fixed name within their namespace. If you get a domain name, for instance, mydomain.info, it's helpful to get them to name the system in the DNS records for that domain, ie nemesis.mydomain.info so that the same hostname works both inside your local network and outside in the general internet. Note that if you only get the static IP address from your ISP, you can buy a domain name through a third party domain name seller and configure that to give the static IP address allocated to you by your ISP when asked for nemesis.mydomain.info. The cost of this can be very low, especially on the lesser domains like .net, .info, etc.

If you want your WACS server to be accessible from the internet, you will have to configure your ADSL/Cable router to do port forwarding. For basic web serving, all you need is TCP/IP port 80 (http) open. You do this by going into your routers NAT Firewall Rules configuration option and set up port forwarding rules for port 80/HTTP to forward to whatever address you set your server up with; if you did this with the example above, the rule would be:

port 80/tcp (http) is forwarded to 192.168.1.10 port 80

	Note
	On many simpler router boxes, the port number can only be forwarded to the same port number on the desination host, so it won't ask you the destination port number. port 80 will be implicit for a port 80 forward.

If your ISP's firewall rules cause you to have to move to a different port, you will need to configure the apache web server to listen on the other port number too (Port 80 is in the standard httpd.conf file, you can add a second line, say Port 8080 straight after it. You will also need to modify the wacs.cfg file's server section to have http://nemesis.mydomain.info:8080/ instead of http://nemesis.mydomain.info/ in each attribute. It does work just fine though...

The usedirect mechanism requires a bit of a rethink about how the filesystem on the web server is laid out. It offers some very distinct speed advantages on loading of web pages, but at the same time has some significant disadvantages. The default configuration for Wacs is set so that it is not used but the standard locations in the packaged versions are configured so you just add it and it will work. When usedirect is used, the modelpages and others give an actual URL for the icon for each set rather than giving a link making reference to the wacsimg program. This means that the icon is obtained directly from the webserver without any intermediary application being called and will conventionally be cached and that cache utilised where possible.

However doing this moves the set icon outside of the access control afforded by Wacs, so technically it is unprotected - if you're using the security mechanism to restrict content from spouses or minors, this is potentially really bad. If you're using the security mechanism in a subscription web server, people being able to get to a single 120 x 120 pixel thumbnail of each of the sets you have, but not the set itself, is probably of no concern at all. Do bear in mind however that if no web page contains a reference to it, people are unlikely to find the thumbnail's full URL unless they have access to your web browsers history, cache or a corporate firewall log. To avoid being too obvious in such histories or firewall logs WACS normally invokes icons via a fairly anonymous call to wacsimg with a set number as an argument - this would not normally trigger any automatic corporate firewall content flagging systems and such a URL is only valid from the authenticated host itself during the time period of the lease.

The Logout option allows for the voluntary relinquishment of a lease ahead of it's expiry time, making this even safer. Other addresses would not be able to display it, nor would the URL be any use after the expiry of the lease. When usedirect is used, the name is obvious, permanent and accessible - it might well trigger corporate firewall content flaggers. WACS can be simultaneously used in both ways - you could use usedirect when at home, and normal access methods when elsewhere. The consequences of using it elsewhere do of course fall on your head - the above comments about corporate firewalls are informational only and in time, who knows, some rulesets may be updated to specifically detect wacs usage.

To enable usedirect operation, you need to ensure that the fsloc section configuration options seticons, officons, vidicons, dvdicons and addicons all point to locations within the web server document tree (ie /var/www/html or similar). The wacsgenimg command (formerly called generate) can then be used to re-create the auto-generated icons under seticons if required; the others will have to be moved (or copied) from their previous locations. From this point on, the icons should someone know the URL by some means, will be accessible to all (unless you restrict them again through the web servers access control mechanism). To enable usedirect functionality, you then add the URL of the web server icon directory to the configuration file using the usedirect keyword.

While the name is slightly misleading and came from it's previous usage to store only rescaled versions of the icons, the scalecache directive specifies a directory in which to place re-scaled versions of the set icons. Each time a specific sized version of an icon is requested, it will be created if needed and copied into a directory tree placed in the directory pointed to by the scalecache configuration variable if that directory exists. If scalecache is not set, it will be retrieved from the usual icon locations and scaled if necessary. The gain here is that the scale cache is organised by set number rather that name, so no database interactions are required to determine if the cached icon is available - the wacsimg command is still used but it runs for a much shorter time and does much less.

The way this works is that if wacsimg is asked for the standard icon for set 14, it simply checks if there is an icon for set 14 at the standard size in the scale cache. If it isn't there, or scalecache is not enabled, it connects to the database, looks up set 14's location and goes and looks for the icon in that location. The main issue with scalecache is that set numbers could potentially “go stale” and it might produce the wrong icon. Additionally, it can take up quite a bit of space. Best practice would probably be to delete or at least expire entries from it over a period of a week or so. This will ensure that active sets, like the newly added ones, are cached but that the cache itself is not swamped by unused and obsolete cached icons.

This option allows access to the scaled versions of thumbnails in much the same way as the usedirect mechanism discussed above does. It's a little bit more secure in that when enabled some protection to your content is afforded by the updating of the .htaccess files within the web server document tree. As with the usedirect, what you're asking for is exposed and the images downloaded will be cached by default. Additionally access control is implemented via the login program, so unless you explicitly log out, other people using the same computer will continue to be able to access all the files (if they know the name) until the next person logs in AFTER the expiry of your lease. Put another way the access control list is only rebuilt without the expired access right when it is next updated with a new entry

The scaled thumbnails used in this way are cached in the directory pointed to by contentt in the fsloc section of the configuration file. However making use of this cache is enabled by adding serverturl in the server section of the configuration file.

Note

Unlike the usedirect option, this option is enabled or disabled at a server level and is not configurable by individual users. If you think your users value the normal URL obscurity, you might wish to avoid using it. You should however be aware that since these caches are organised by set number rather than set name, they expose far less than the names of icons do in the case of icon names exposed by usedirect.

	Tip
	What WACS has to write in the .htaccess file differs between different versions of the Apache web server software. WACS can write these files in either Apache 2.2 or Apache 2.4 format. If you upgrade the OS on your web server, you may be affected by this and need to switch this over. Packages include the correct configuration for their intended OS version

With the content cacheing system enabled, it becomes possible to offer streaming video in conjunction with the appropriate plug-in support enabled within the web server. This is only possible when using direct access to the files as configured by wacscachectl. This is now offered as an option during new set markup, and future development work for WACS will include tool options to retro-enable it for previously created video sets. Content caching is currently available for two types of video files: Flash Video files (.flv) through the use of the mod_flvx plug-in, and more usefully for most sites for h264/mp4 files using the mod_h264_streaming plug-in module.

	Warning
	Check the licenses on these plug-ins before utilising them on a commercial site - at least one of them has some restriction on free use

Once these modules are enabled within your Apache web server, suitable aware clients such as videolan.org's VLC video player will be able to instantly play and seek around in video clips hosted on WACS. Additionally embedded video players within suitable HTML5 conformant web sites should also be able to do so. There is no additional configuration of either these plug-in modules or of WACS itself beyond those discussed already that is needed to make use of them.

	Note
	As of WACS 0.9.2, none of the WACS standard web apps use HTML5 embedded players, but this is expected to change for the next release of WACS as we start making active use of all the new technologies for improved performance encorporated in the WACS 0.9.x release series.

One of the big new features in Wacs 0.8.0 was the introduction of the configurable menu system. With this we did an extensive review of how our existing menus were constructed and decided to remove the old separation between those images housed in a dedicated area for each upstream source and those housed in more general areas. This supplier-identified versus content type based architecture may have suited our original development environment but we don't think it really reflects how most people would visualise and use folders in a normal WACS installation.

So the new default layout in 0.8.0 gets rid of the vendor area distinction completely. However if existing Wacs users who adopted the old vendor based architecture want to preserve it, or others have some special reason for wanting it organised that way, there are still facilities to keep it the way it was. This document takes you through the changes needed to reproduce the old layout using the 0.8.0 release.

 <vendormode>Y</vendormode>

 <layout>
  <vendormode>Y</vendormode>
 </layout>

<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<menu>
 <fpmenu2>
  <menutitle>Sections: General</menutitle>
  <default>#CGIURL#wacsimgcats</default>
  <entry>
   <type>foreach</type>
   <variable>isarea</variable>
   <title>#OPTDESC# - images</title>
   <target>#CGIURL#wacsshow/sarea=#OPTIONS#</target>
  </entry>
  <entry>
   <type>foreach</type>
   <variable>vsarea</variable>
   <title>#OPTDESC# - videos</title>
   <target>#CGIURL#wacsvidshow/sarea=#OPTIONS#</target>
  </entry>
 </fpmenu2>
 <fpmenu3>
  <menutitle>Sections: Vendors</menutitle>
  <default>#CGIURL#wacsvidcats</default>
  <entry>
   <type>foreach</type>
   <variable>isarea</variable>
   <title>#OPTDESC# - images</title>
   <target>#CGIURL#wacsshow/sarea=#OPTIONS#</target>
  </entry>
  <entry>
   <type>foreach</type>
   <variable>vsarea</variable>
   <title>#OPTDESC# - videos</title>
   <target>#CGIURL#wacsvidshow/sarea=#OPTIONS#</target>
  </entry>
 </fpmenu3>
</menu>

Once this file is in place, log in to Wacs and try out the menus - the separate collections-versus-category menus should work as before. Please do be aware however that the backwards compatibility features may not remain in the Wacs system permanently.

One of the questions we have been asked about WACS is whether it is possible to run multiple separate instances of WACS on a single server. The answer is yes, and this document sets out how you configure this to work. The one limitation at present is that all the instances need to run the same release of Wacs because the standard WACS modules (that do all the hard work) are installed globally on the host server.

The current development environment for the MySQL version of the WACS system is based upon MariaDB release 10.0.23 as provided with Fedora 23 Linux. MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL code and is closely related to MySQL 5 - no code changes have been made to specifically support it, so most MySQL 5.x servers or above should work fine. Some of the more advanced features in Wacs require nested selects to be supported, a feature that was introduced to MySQL after the conventional 4.x series releases. Anything with version 5 should be OK and it's possible that it will work but with some limitations on version 4.

The current development environment for the Oracle version of the WACS system is based on the x86_64 version V11.1.0.6, but retaining support for Oracle 10; the upgrade to Oracle 11 happened at Wacs release 0.8.4. We are not aware of any features that Wacs requires that don't work in Oracle 9, 10 or 11. There might be some problems on Oracle 8 or older due to issues on getting table structure meta-data for the perl DBD driver.

There are currently seven general default menus which can always be assumed to exist in a WACS configuration - these menus are available in both the Perl and PHP versions of the API and are used by most of the standard Wacs tools.

Shown below is a very simple sample menu.

<?xml version='1.0' standalone='yes'?>
<menu>
 <main>
  <menutitle>Main Menu</menutitle>
  <default>#WACSALLM#</default>
  <entry>
   <type>static</type>
   <title>All Models Index</title>
   <target>#WACSALLM#</target>
  </entry>
  <entry>
   <type>static</type>
   <title>PHP Demo</title>
   <target>#BASEURL#simple/index.php</target>
  </entry>
 </main>
</menu>

Diving straight in, here is the handler menu from the simple.cfg file distributed with the Wacs-Php Simple Skin.

 <handlers>
  <models>#BASEURL#simple/girlie.php?modelno=#OPTIONS#<models>
  <photographer>#</photographer>
 </handlers>

The first of the active lines specifies that links on model names should link to the model page from the Wacs-Php simple skin, girlie.php. The second one merely suppresses the link to photographers, as the environment concerned does not include a displayer for that data type. If you want to test for a null return, check for the reply being just the hash symbol.

wacsnewmodels lists models recently added to the database - it extends it's definition of newly added dynamically from two weeks up to two years in two week increments until it has found more than six new models.

wacsnewsets lists sets recently added to the database. Optionally takes an argument of a date from which to work back - this function is used by the previous week link at the bottom of the normal page but can actually take any arbitary date. To do this for the week backwards from the 21st September 2006, this would be called with wacsnewsets/21-SEP-2006. [NB: this is currently assumed to be native date format of the database, ie 21-SEP-2006 for Oracle or 2006-09-21 for MySQL; one would hope that other SQL implementations would at least accept dates in one of these formats.]

It also includes a facility to import all of the new sets for the week concerned into a tag set for subsequent perusal. To do this, you need to select a tag set number which has not been used before, unless you wish to append the new items to this tag set. If you select tag set 599, to copy all new sets this week into this you call wacsnewsets with wacsnewsets/T599. It is also possible to create a tag group of those sets that were new at a previous date; for the 8th September 2006 into tage set 597, you would call wacsnewsets with wacsnewsets/T597=08-SEP-2006.

wacsnewvideo is same code and features as wacsnewsets, just with the control variable changed so it features video clips instead of image sets. All the same features and options are supported.

wacsshow makes a pretty index of the categories for a given sarea including a few items from each area taken at random. For example to browse the section redheads, you would invoke wacsshow with wacsshow/sarea=redheads. It can also take additional arguments including order, sample and limit. The order argument can be either order=F for a conventional forward sort, ie A-Z or 0-9, or order=R for a reverse sort, ie Z-A or 9-0. The primary point of this is to use for galleries where it can be used to put the highest numbered, ie latest, galleries first on the list. The sample argument selects how it should select the highlighted images; the options are sample=R for a random sample, sample=L for the latest additions to be shown, or sample=H for the highest rated sets to be shown.

	Note
	sample=H is silently ignored for models at this point because it would require excessive additional database activity to calculate.

The limit argument is used to reduce the number of subareas featured takes the form of limit=5 which would limit wacsshow to five areas. You can combine these to form something like: wacsshow/sarea=redheads:order=R:sample=H:limit=5 which would show the latest five galleries in the areas redheads, select the sample images from the very highest rated sets and show just five galleries.

Wacsshow's behaviour is significantly controlled by the precedence section of the WACS configuration file. In this a default precedence can be set to either models or sets; it can also be overriden per specific sarea. So you might set your default precidence to sets, but decide that for the sarea redheads you would override this to models. Thus when looking at some other area, such as maybe "usenet" for general stuff downloaded off the net where each set is not necessarily linked with any model, it shows you a selection from the sets within that section. However when you look in "redheads", it will instead show you the model icons of those models with sets featured under this section. For more information on configuring this behaviour, please see the bit about configuring precedence in the config section.

wacsvidshow - the video version of wacsshow - options as above.

wacsslideshow runs a web-based slide show of a set. Sometimes more convenient than downloading a zip is to watch a slideshow online. This functionality is provided by wacsslideshow, to invoke basically just call with the set number, for instance for set123 call it with wacsslideshow/set123. It can also support the display of a tag set or connection set in a similar fashion, merely invoke with tag and the relevant (set-based) tag number, for instance to see all sets in tag504 call it with wacsslideshow/tag504. For a connection, invoke it with conn and the connection number, as in wacsslideshow/conn10 to show connection 10 as a slide show. To do a slideshow of all a model's sets, you can use either mod or model followed by the model number, eg call it with wacsslideshow/model1234 to show all of model no 1234's sets.

wacsfp is the standard front page of the WACS system. It doesn't take any options at this time, but offers dynamically generated, context sensitive pulldown menus on top of a selection of random suggestions and useful links allowing a wide range of access around the entire Wacs system.

All of wacsfp's menus can be configured as desired and are called fpmenu1 through fpmenu7. Additionally from Wacs 0.9.0 onwards a site banner logo can be added to the top line by creating a JPG of 32 x approximately 200 pixels, calling it sitebanner.jpg and placing it in the location pointed to by wacsurl in the configuration file. By default this is /usr/share/wacs/html on all packaged versions of WACS.

wacsimgcats generates a concise index of the images. Without an argument does everything. Can also take an sarea as an argument, so to look at only the area called "redheads", call with wacsimgcats/sarea=redheads

wacsimglist produces thumbnails of the images in the specified location - normally takes a complete sarea and scategory listing as arguments. Thus for a redhead with small breasts called Sarah, you would invoke it with wacsimglist/sarea=redheads:scategory=smalltits/Sarah. Optionally, it will also support a photographer based narrowing of the list, so if you wanted Sarah's sets only by photographer Fred, you would invoke it with wacsimglist/sarea=redheads:scategory=smalltits/Sarah:sphotog=Fred . wacsimglist can also cope with a wildcard at the end of the category field, so you could invoke it with wacsimglist/sarea=redheads:scategory=smalltits/+ to show you all redheads with small tits. You can further narrow it down using the sphotog selection criteria as well, so that to see all Fred's sets of small titted redheads, you can do: wacsimglist/sarea=redheads:scategory=smalltits/+:sphotog=Fred . It will also accept slocation and sfoundry as either a replacement for sarea or as a modifier on any other valid selection. This is invoked by wacsimgcats and wacsshow, and calls wacsindex to display any set selected. Note that if the /+ is appended to the end, the output will include it's last component as a title; if it's left off, no title will be added.

wacsimglist also supports use of the conn (connections) table - if you invoke it with wacsimglist/cgroup=123 it will display the members of cgroup 123. This can also be modified with the sphotog= option as above. Wacsimglist similarly supports displaying tag sets via the same mechanism, ie wacsimglist/tgroup=123.

wacsvidcats is the video version of wacsimgcats. Uses exactly the same script with a control variable changed in it.

wacsvidlist is video version of wacsimglist. Uses exactly the same script with a control variable changed in it. Supports photographer and foundry searches in exactly the same way.

wacssetlist is a third version of the wacsimglist and wacsvidlist commands discussed previously which supports displaying all media types that meet the criteria specified. Each media type is given it's appropriate background and links to allow viewing or downloading it. This has proved particularly useful for connections that feature different media types in the same grouping. This is now used by WacsListConn when displaying a selected connection.

wacsphotcats is the photographer catalogue, it's again based upon wacsimgcats with a control variable changed. To search for a given photographer's sets, for example, SWE (Sweet Photography) call with wacsphotcats/SWE.

wacslistphotog produces a list of photographers, ranked by rating, with a little bit of information about them. Each one links to wacsphotocats to display that photographer's work. It takes no options at this point.

wacsstats produces a number of different statistics about the current wacs collection - in particular, it does a whole range of top 25s - models with the most sets, videos, images, biggest sets, etc. Not particularly essential, but great fun and a different angle from which to explore the Wacs collecton.

wacsmodelthumbs displays thumbnails of models in the database. By default, this will display all the models in the database - this can be a lot of entries so there are many modifiers available to limit the results to something useful.

First up there are the flagged models - currently this consists of six categories: Cuties (C) defined as good looking models whose sets are not particularly explicit, Solo (S) models mostly selected for good solo sets, Lesbian (L) those who have particularly good lesbian sets, Straight (F) models who have particularly good straight sets, Featured Models (M) for those who are currently being highlighted for one reason or another and Placeholders (P) used to hide pseudo-model entries that may be convenient for download purposes (for instance a group combination) but aren't real identifiable single models. For each of these, just provide the appropriate capital letter when calling wacsmodelthumbs, for instance use wacsmodelthumbs/C for Cuties, and wacsmodelthumbs/L for Lesbian sets.

Next up is the vendor search mechanism. Here it is assumed that you've utilitised the idmap facility and have allocated an appropriate abrieviation to each source of material. So if for instance you've marked models from Sapphic Erotica (www.sapphicerotica.com) with an IDMap flag of SE, the following examples would apply. To see all models with content from Sapphic Erotica, you would call wacsmodelthumbs with wacsmodelthumbs/V=SE where V stands for vendor. You can further select just those models to whom you've given a top rating, ie a mrating value of 4 or 5, using the Q (for Quality) selector. Thus wacsmodelthumbs/Q=SE will select only your top rated models from vendor SE. Another vendor based selector is connected to the download mechanism - N - selects models who have had new sets added within the last three months (as determined by the refresh and chkmodel commands on their last run). Thus wacsmodelthumbs/N=AMK will select only those models updated within the last three months. A companion to this is the D (for Dormant) selector: this selects those models who have not been active within the last three months. Thus wacsmodelthumbs/D=KPC will select all Karup's PC (KPC) models who have not had new sets added in the last three months.

The final two vendor search options are designed to help with maintenance of the system and shows those models from a given vendor who have not yet been rated or who have incomplete identification to be selected. The U (for Unclassified) selector finds models with sets from this vendor who have no specified rating, it is used like this: wacsmodelthumbs/U=SE. The X (for Incomplete) selector finds models flagged as coming from this site but where we have no key or last checked information for them. You can look for models with incomplete ids with wacsmodelthumbs/X=KHA which will find models from Karup's Hometown Amateurs (KHA) with incomplete information.

Next is the Alpha-search mechanism, used typically for doing pages for a given letter of the alphabet, but quite capable of being even more selective if required. For an index of models with names beginning with H, you would call wacsmodelthumbs with wacsmodelthumbs/A=H. When using the Alpha search mode (A=), there will be a row of links for each letter of the alphabet along the top of the page, just below the normal hot item links. If you want to search for all models begining with Bet for example, you can do wacsmodelthumbs/A=Bet and it'll find Beth, Betsy, Betty, etc. It will also find models with an alias of Betty or an identity record for a site with a name of Betty ^[1]. If for example you have the prolific Hungarian model Zafira in your system, Zafira will appear in a search for Betty as she's called Betty 2 on Karup's PC. This can be a little confusing at first, but is actually very useful when you've figured out what is actually going on.

	Note
	The search for aliases and idmap names is only enabled if you give two or more characters in the search, the wacsmodelthumbs/A=B will not include Zafira as that is trying to produce a straight forward alphabetic index. Search for wacsmodelthumbs/A=Be and alias and identity map names will be included, and in this example Zafira will be included in the results.

Finally you can get wacsmodelthumbs to display an index of models in a model based tag set by using the T option. For example, to display the members of tag set 595 (which must be a tag set of models, not sets), you would call wacsmodelsthumbs with wacsmodelthumbs/T595. In summary, the options are:

wacsmodelthumbs is capable of colour-coding the names of the various models to show key aspects of their status and ratings - this is enabled or disabled by the indexcolours directive in the configuration file. When enabled, (indexcolours = Y), it will colour model's names as follows: green - rating of 4 or 5 (ie a high rating), amber - rating of 3 (a medium rating), magenta rating of 1 or 2 (a low rating). Models with no sets yet unpacked will be coloured blue. Black signifies all others - typically some sets but no rating.

wacsmodelindex displays a detailed index of models. This displays a far more comprehensive index of each matching model's details and includes most of the information in the database reformatted into sensible sentances (mostly!). It gives details on age, country of origin, shows any notes, and lists the number of outstanding sets/videos yet to be downloaded and already downloaded but not catalogued. It's a highly extended version of wacsmodelthumbs and accepts all of the same optional selection parameters listed above.

wacsmodelpage displays a model's portfolio and exists in four different versions all of which share common code and display differing amounts of detail. We will start with the third version out of the four in order of ascending amounts of detail. In this form, the command is called wacsmodelpage which is also it's generic name.

This is the main page for looking at model's work; it has a heading section at the top with the big icon and a selection of attributes about her and navigation bar. Below it has a box of information including the icon, attributes and size for each set and video of hers that we have. Normally wacsmodelpage is invoked with our model number for a model, for instance wacsmodelpage/147 would retrieve the page for our model 147. However, if the model number concerned is not found, the key given is also tried for any idmap keys that might match. This is not very useful for sites which started their own model numbers from a low number, but works very well for keys from sites such as those from the AMKingdom group who have a really good alpha-numeric reference scheme. In this scheme, a model called Karlie is kar042, a model called Sabrina is sab001, and so on the numbers incrementing sequentially for each new model with that three letter prefix. It also works for sites such as how Karup's PC used to be ^[2] where the model key is her name followed by a number, thus for a model with key bailey_(2) you can use that (complete with brackets of course).

There are currently nine groups of modifiers on the behaviour of wacsmodelpage. By default, if a prefexcl attribute exists within the access control list file (see Chapter 12, Security) for the current host/user combination, this will be applied to the search of the models portfolio. When this mode is enabled a warning and link is added in the page heading. To disable the preference exclusions (prefexcl) mode for model 123, you call wacsmodelpage with a /N appended to the URL, as in wacsmodelpage/123/N. This functionality is all suppressed if the prefexcl flag is not set for the current user.

The second modifier allows the copying of all of this model's sets to a tag index, to add model 123's sets to tag set 456, you call wacsmodelpage with wacsmodelpage/123/T456. All of these options work for idmap based key searches too, so if you want Erika's (from AMK) sets added to the tag set, you can do wacsmodelpage/eri046/T456 . You can also specify that a tag set should be created with the next available tag set number by using /Tnext as in wacsmodelpage/eri046/Tnext. In addition to the T option which tags both Image and Video sets, there is also an I option which tags only the image sets, as in wacsmodelpage/123/I456 or wacsmodelpage/123/Inext. The V option has the corresponding effect but for video files instead of image sets.

The third option allows you to display only those sets by a specific photographer, this is done with the /P= option. This might be used as in wacsmodelpage/123/P=BMB to select only those sets by model no 123 that were shot by photographer BMB (this cancels out the preference exclusion feature, intentionally). The fourth option is similar to the third, and appears under the same pulldown menu and selects the foundry from which the sets came. It is available from Wacs 0.8.6 onwards. This is specified with the S (for source) option as in wacsmodelpage/123/S=pinkmetallic - this is not required to be in the vendors database, but the printable name will be used in descriptions if it is found. This does not cancel the preference exclusions although you could always use /N on the end to do so.

The fifth option allows you to display only those sets featuring a lesbian liason between the main model and a second specified model, so if for instance you wanted to see those sets where model 9 goes with model 15, you would do wacsmodelpage/9/L=15.

The next two options relate to attributes of the sets and do not cancel the preference exclusions. The sixth option R (for Room) is to select sets and videos only in a specified location, done with the /R= option. If you want to select sets in the bathroom only, you would do wacsmodelpage/204/R=Bathroom . The seventh option A (for Attire) is to select sets and videos where the model is wearing the specified type of Attire. For instance if you want only sets featuring Swimwear, you would do wacsmodelpage/147/A=Swimwear; for school-themed clothing like cheerleader or schoolgirl you would use wacsmodelpage/147/A=Schoolwear.

The eighth option F (for Flag) is to select sets and videos only with the specified set type, done with the /F= option. If you want to select Lesbian sets only, you would do wacsmodelpage/1080/F=L ; for toys, you would use wacsmodelpage/1080/F=T. This option does override the preference exclusions; if you ask for a type you've excluded it would be pointless not to show it to you.

The ninth option O (for Official) simply tells the model page to use the official icon in preference to the standard first image one where both are available.

	Note
	If the preference exclusions (prefexcl) feature is active, it will be applied to the tag set creation, so only the preferred types of sets will be tagged. At the moment the modifiers are mutually exclusive with the exception of the /N and /O and tagging options which should be usable with any other combination.

wacsmpfull is the most detailed and verbose of all the model page varients displaying information about download records, previous identities, and so on. It also tries to display all we know about a given model's sets. As before, it supports all of the same features as the main wacsmodelpage.

wacsmpthumbs displays a model's portfolio in a smaller, more condensed table layout. It is actually wacsmodelpage with a different global option set; all the same features are included. Preference exclusions, the /N override and the /Ttagno, /P=photog, and /L=modelno and other modifiers are all fully supported.

wacsmpmini displays really small thumbnails for those models with huge numbers of sets. As with wacsmpthumbs this is again wacsmodelpage with a different global option set, so the same options and features are supported.

wacstagsets displays a set-based tag set. To invoke for tagset 456, call with wacstagsets/456. Note that one of the options to wacsmodelindex above provides equivalent functionality for model-based tag sets.

	Note
	The limited editing functionality that used to be provided by wacstagsets was removed in Wacs 0.9.1 as it was very cumbersome and no longer worked properly with modern browsers. The new wacstagedit command provides a much improved interface to editing tag sets.

wacstagsets has had a major update in wacs 0.9.1 and now provides much better browsing facilities, with links to wacsshow and the ability for administrators to add sets from the tag sets to a connection.

wacslisttags lists current known tag sets. Wacslisttags provides the main way into using the tag system - it profers an index of the currently defined tag sets and calls wacstagsets or wacsmodelindex appropriately. It does not take any options at this point. Only an admin level user can see all people's tags, other users are restricted to those they have created, are owned by 'wacs' or have been set as public. WacsListTags now includes an option for set based tags to call the wacsslideshow program to see a slideshow of the whole tag set. Wacslisttags now includes a link on the tag number to a short form index (via wacsimglist) and to the more detailed wacstagsets on the title of the tag set. It also shows administrators the owner of the tag set concerned.

	Note
	wacstagedit replaced the limited editing functions of wacstagsets with a more comprehensive tool and is now the normal way to edit tag sets.

wacstagedit provides a comprehensive interface to editing tag sets (aka saved searches). It supports tag sets containing models, and both image and video sets. It is invoked with wacstagedit/123 if you wish to see and edit tag set 123.

wacsimgselect searches for photosets by attribute. This application puts up a form with lots of options based upon source, attributes, photographer and rating; when this form is submitted a new tag set is created with the results of the search. It doesn't take any special options, all interaction is via the web form.

wacsvidselect searches for videos by attribute. This is a version of wacsimgselect modified to work with videos.

wacsmodelselect searches for models by attribute. This application puts up a form that allows you to search for models by their attributes. When the form is submitted it creates a model tag set of all the matching records.

This command is a totally different approach to searching for models as it offers a number of icons and as each is selected it interactively updates the page with those models who match. It does not (at present) produce a saved search as a result. For more details, please see the chapter on it towards the end of the WACS User Guide. It can only be linked to and doesn't take any arguments at present.

Like modelsel, the setsel application makes use of AJAX dynamic content tools provided by jQuery to create a dynamic application for exploring the collection. This one allows you to explore the sets within WACS on a progressive filtering basis. Already surpassing the abilities of modelsel, we have a lot of additional enhancements planned for future versions.# Please see the WACS User Guide for more information.

In addition to the web apps written in PHP in the style of and integrated with the normal WACS applications, the wacs-php project includes a demonstration web site written in PHP using WACS. Included in this are a number of search apps including one that combines attributes from both sets and models to allow for very advanced searches to be constructed. For more information, please see the documentation on the Simple Skin in the wacs-php package.

wacsfull sends the full size image from a set - for image 45 of set 123, call with wacsfull/set123-45.jpg. If called with scale instead of set, it will rescale and shrink the image as specified in the current user preference settings. To use the scaling option, call with wacsfull/scale123-45.jpg.

wacsframe puts a simple HTML page wrapper around an image provided by wacsfull to provide a better browsing experience. It is typically called by wacsindex with four parameters separated by = (Equals signs). The first parameter is the stem of the wacsfull command (set1234 or scale1234) depending on the desired base image; the second parameter is the image number within the set to display, the third parameter is the number of images in the whole set, the final parameter is a list of models involved. An example invocation asking for image 12 of a 76 image set called 456 featuring Sarah, our model no 123, scaled to the current scaling factor would be: wacsframe/scale456=12=76=Sarah-123. Multiple models can be called using commas , as in [...]=Sarah-123,Jane+P-67 thus adding links to Sarah, model no 123, and Jane P, model no 67. The complexitity of this URL completely avoids the need for this script to talk to the WACS database or configuration system at all.

wacsimg sends the icon for the specified set - for set 123, to get the icon call with wacsimg/set123.jpg. To force it to produce only official icons, call with wacsimg/icon123.jpg. For scaling to the standard icon size, as specified in the configuration file layout section option "thumbsize", use wacsimg/std123.jpg. To get a minature icon as specified by the "minisize" option, use wacsimg/mini123.jpg

wacsindex provides details of, and thumbnails of the specified set - for set 123, call with wacsindex/set123.html. Note that this has now been enhanced to include the official icon if available, and attempts to make some kind of page for videos as well. It will also include any set description (sdesc) that has been added for that set. It will also show any additional icons that have been associated via the additional icons (saddicon) field. If called with wacsindex/page123.html, it will produce a pretty format multi-page index instead of the standard full set page. Subsequent pages are called by wacsindex/page123-2.html and so on. If called with wacsindex/info123.html, it will produce detailed information for the set along with a group of eight icons from even spaced locations through the set giving some idea of the action.

wacspage is actually a clone of wacsindex but is configured to operate only in the prettyist mode, the page mode. The trick is that the prefix on the set number is menu configuration name to make use of. So if you want to use the wacsindex within a custom web site, you can do this with wacspage. There is a worked example of this as part of the Wacs-PHP simple skin making use of the simple.cfg where you call wacspage with wacspage/simple234.html.

wacsthumb provides the specified thumbnail image from the set - for the thumbnail image for image 45 of set 123, call with wacsthumb/set123-45.jpg. Additionally from Wacs 0.8.5, wacsthumb can be used to retrieve, scale and cache additional icons from the directory specifed in the set. The additional icons can be retrieved at normal size (which may include upscaling them) using wacsthumb/add123-4.jpg or at mini icon size using wacsthumb/addmini123-4.jpg. Also added in Wacs 0.8.5 is the ability to provide .png files as an alternative to .jpg, merely by requesting wacsthumb/set123-45.png. The final new ability added in Wacs 0.8.5 is the ability to provide mini versions of the thumbnails through wacsthumb/mini123-45.jpg.

wacszip is used to retrieve an archive file of actual content. For an image set, it returns a zip file; for a video set the video file. It can be called with any of the supported extensions (.zip, .wmv, .mpg or .mov) and will return the content regardless. Generally, getting the extension right is vital to the browser doing the right thing, but wacszip doesn't care! Examples of use would be wacszip/set123.zip and wacszip/set456.mpg.

wacsusc2257 displays the 18 USC 2257 declaration for the set named, or if that fails a generic summary of upstream source data. Example of use would be wacsusc2257/123 this should be used on all pages showing actual image content.

wacsaddtag adds a model or set to a tag. In order to simplify the process of tag handling and make it modular and distinct from each of the retrieval tools that might wish to use it, tags are actually manipulated using completely separate cgi-bin programs. These are called with the necessary parameters to do the tag manipulation requested and return a PNG image on completion - a tick for success, a cross for failure. Thus addtag is called repeatedly to add each entry into a tag group. At the simplest level, there are two default temporary tag sets, tag set no 1 for sets, and tag set no 2 for models. To add set 123 to the default tag set for sets, you would call wacsaddtag with wacsaddtag/S123. To add model 12 to the default tag set for models, call it with wacsaddtag/M12.

To provide a better interface for the search engine to use, wacsaddtag also has two more complex options, A and G. These each take three arguments separated by equals signs; A is for sets and takes desired tag number, set to add to it, and description of this tag; G is the equivalent for models and takes tag number, model number and tag description. Thus to add set 123 to tag set 456 and call it Cuties Outdoors, you would call wacsaddtag with wacsaddtag/A456=123=Cuties+Outdoors. For models, say you want to add Sarah (model 63) to Cute Redheads (tag 789), you call wacsaddtag with wacsaddtag/G789=63=Cute+Redheads.

wacsdeltag removes the specified item from the specified tag set. To remove set 123 from tag set 456, you would call wacsdeltag with wacsdeltag/S456=123 - note that the tag number always follows the key letter. To delete all entries in tag set 456, you would call it with wacsdeltag/S456=all. Wacsdeltag also does the same with models, so to delete Sarah (model 63) from tag set 789, you would use wacsdeltag/M789=63. Once again, if you put all, you can delete that entire model-based tag set, as in wacsdeltag/M789=all.

wacsmarktag marks a specific tag set member as already viewed. To mark a set as seen call wacsmarktag with wacsmarktag/S456=123. It also supports model-based tag sets, as in wacsmarktag/M789=63. To clear the marked-as-viewed state on a complete tag set, you would do wacsmarktag/S456=reset and all records will be set back to unmarked. This only allows updating of temporary (search result) tag sets. It is also possible to use wacsmarktag to archive older search results to drop them from the visible list - they can still be viewed if called explicitly. For instance, to archive tag 34 (containing sets), you would use wacsmarktag/Z34=all. For model-based tag sets, it would be wacsmarktag/Y20=all.