Instead of uploading files one or two at a time, you can upload many at once by using a tar or tar.gz file. However, they’re not the easiest things to make on windows. If you do a bit of googling though, you might come across http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/cr1/gz.html . It’s a small drag and drop util for making tar.gz files, and from the basic tests i’ve done with it creates archives that work fine with matrix.
What should the internal structure of the file be? tar.gz supports paths withing the archive and there are references to a “mysource_files” directory where all extra files (css, images etc) live. Should the extra files be in this directory in the archive or should everything be in the root? Should the Parse file have a specific name or does it just need to be in the root with a .html extention?
I also noticed that the Designs reference and User Manual have a different location for assoicated files in the Parse file. Designs(page 7) says “mysource_files” and the User Manual(page 181) says “files”. I’ve add a bug report about it.
The parse file is always uploaded independantly and should not be included in the associated files archive. When we unpack the archive, we simply import every file found (regardless of internal structure) as a child of the design itself. Therefore, it should only contain the images and other files (css, js, Flash, etc) that are required by the design.
The virtual path is only required within the parsefile and is replaced during parsing the PHP code that determines the correct URL at run-time.
k. thanks.
Maybe it would be worth having the parse file as a specific name and being able to import that from the archive also. That would allow complete designs to be distributed/delivered as a single file that can be imported in one action. This would make things a lot easier for designers and site maintainers.