What is it?

CRATES is designed to be the quickest route between producing content and sharing it without compromising how it looks, how your data is handled, or who can read it.

CRATES is a system for efficiently organizing and sharing groups of all kinds of information and media and the information about those groups. CRATES stands for Content Reference And TEmplate System, but the image of a big crate you can put all your stuff into is closer to the heart of this project than any awkward acronym.

Get it ready, put it in a box, and stick a label on it

CRATES are for things worth sharing and keeping. Whatever it is that you do, I want you to think of a recent project when you created something. Maybe you took a bunch of photos on a picinic, or you filled out some spreadsheets, or you wrote a few memorable email messages. If you wanted to archive or share these results, you’d do a certain few things no matter what you made. You would:

• get your results ready to present
• group them in a distinct way and say something about the group
• package them in some complimentary way

Now imagine putting your finished work into a box that could recognize what you were putting into it and would automatically group and package it for you according to your instructions. More than that, once you put a label on that box, anyone who could read the label would be able to share your work, either in the way you chose to present it, or remixed and embedded into their own context.

A simple example

Right now, there are only a few interpreters and processors for CRATES, and they mostly deal with images. That’s because I mostly deal with images, and the things I wanted to do with them online led me to write CRATES. So, if I take a few pictures this afternoon, here’s how CRATES would help me with them.

First, I put all the information I want attached to each image in its IPTC profile. What's IPTC?

Then I upload them to my server and put them in a new directory within my CRATES root directory. These directories, and the files, can be called anything you want.

Next I go to the Cratr and tell it where my new directory is, what I want to call that CRATE, and give it a description, some tags, and maybe a title image.

Then the Cratr looks at my files and checks to see if I have any Processors that read those files. I do, so it tells me which ones are available and what they do.

After I choose the one that reads IPTC data, the Cratr looks for Interpreters that accept the output from that Processor.

I don’t like scrolling through photo galleries, so I choose the one that will display my images with a lightbox effect, and I choose the .css formatting that I prefer.

Once I click “submit”, my CRATE is done.

In my new CRATE’s directory, I now have an .xml file with all the data from my individual images and all the metadata about the group. I also have an XHTML file in that CRATE’s directory that presents my content and information the way I like. A listing for this CRATE has also been added to my site index, which can be filtered by tag or any other aspect of CRATE metadata, and it’s been added to my RSS feed.

What makes it different?

There are lots of other things on the internet that do stuff much more exciting than that simple processor, and there are thousands of much more elaborate templates than that interpreter. CRATES doesn’t change any of that. Processors aren’t a new kind of script, and interpreters aren’t new ways of displaying content. Anything that can be done with content on the internet can also be done through CRATES with very little adjustment to the original code or markup. Once a script is plugged into CRATES, it can be remixed with any other CRATES element, and your results can be presented in many different places in many different ways.

 

How Do You Use it?

Right now, if you want to share images on the internet, you can download and run CRATES on a server with php 5.x.

1. Follow the Installation instructions in Readme.txt.
2. Upload groups of your images, with or without IPTC data*, into separate directories within your home folder.
3. Make sure you set the permissions on that folder to “0777”.
4. Go to www.yoursite.com/cratr and follow the directions.

CRATES will make easily-updatable galleries from your images, add them to a searchable, tagged site-index, and create an RSS feed. All without a database.

Want to do more? See The Roadmap or For Developers

*A Note on IPTC data: Adobe Photoshop and Bridge CS3 and, according to some accounts, CS4, will strip or damage IPTC and XMP data in files when using “Save for Web and Devices.” If you want to use this option, there are many free IPTC editors available. For more detail on how the Processor included with CRATES handles IPTC data, see CRATES.zip->cratr->processors->IPTC_Parse->processor.xml

 

What’s Next?

The strength of an individual CRATE comes from having powerful Processors and good Interpreters and relavent Reporters. The strength of CRATES as a system comes from its flexibility in accepting any kind of Processor, Interpreter, or Reporter you want to make. Right now, the system works but there aren’t a lot of Processors, Interpreters, or Reporters. If you use a script to do something with your content right now, have a look at the xxxx For Developers section to find out how you could use it with CRATES. If you’d like to see something done with CRATES, send a suggestion. For now, check the xxxx Roadmap to see what’s planned for the future.

If you want more out of CRATES but don't want to write code, here’s the best way to get it.