Some features I'd like to see

[feja]

We are a Mac household so finding DVDpedia was a godsend. We have been using DVDProfiler and while I do still love it, our PC crashes all the time. Some features I'd like to see: (some may have already been suggested, sorry)

-Ability to click on an actor/actress and see all the movies I have for them. (I know I can do this from statistics but when I'm at a movie it would be a nice feature to have clickable names.
-A separate section for Cast. And the ability to click on their name to see all the movies I have for them. I am adding them to the Credits field but would really like a separate section.
-A section where I can add the actual nominations and/or wins. Example: Oscar Win for Cinematography, Razzie Win for Actor, SAG Nomination for Best Picture, etc. And would like them clickable so I can see all the Oscar wins for Cinematography, etc.

Kim

[feja]

oops forgot one.

-Box set capabilities to list the individual movies. I'm working around this by adding each movies separately.

[Conor]

Thank you for the feedback. Some of the requests you can modify DVDpedia already to integrate.

The info view, where the movie information is shown, is HTML and user can modify it. To include links that can be clicked to perform a search, like in the statistics, the links would have this format (the second type, credit search, that you are interested in only works in the beta):

Code: Select all

<a href="pedia://bruji.com/filterBy=[key:director]&field=director">[key:director]</a>
or
<a href="pedia://bruji.com/filterBy=[credit:name]&field=credits">[credit:name]</a>

To modify an info view you create an HTML file inside your data folder in an "InfoTemplate" folder and then you change to the new template style by control clicking the info view in DVDpedia and selecting the style. To get you started I made the change to the default collections style and named it CollectionsLinks. [url=dvdpedia://www.bruji.com/download?temp/infoviewlinks.zip]Click to install[/url] (remember in order to filter by actor you need to also have the beta).

There is an awards field where you can enter the awards a movie has won and then use smart collections to display all the movies that have won a particular award (awards field contains Cinematography and awards field contains Oscar). It's not as quick as having a listing for each award that can be clicked, but functional.

[noribori]

I tried the DVDpedia Beta and the "CollectionLinks" style in Info window, and it works "as advertised". Which is good. It's nice to click on a name and see the movies with that name. That's faster than typing the names into the search field. On the other hand, I also get some mixed results: when I click on "Gary Cooper" in the Info window, I also get "Billy Elliot (2000)" as a result, because there is a GARY Lewis and a Adam COOPER among the staff.

Apart from that, this could grow into a great, great feature. If only DVDpedia could show me in advance if some of the names of my selected movie are shared by other movies within my collection. Clicking on each name is still so much work that I wouldn't want to do that very often. Wouldn't it be great if DVDpedia could automatically give me hints, showing me for a selected movie all the movie connections within my collection I would have missed otherwise?

The statistics window isn't very useful in that case. So many names, and I don't have the slightest idea which movies they are related to. I know, I can click on some names, but that's not very useful if I want movie connections for a certain movie.
Is it possible to get the statistics for all the names of a certain movie? Currently, when only one movie is selected, I get the statistics for the complete collection. (I found a trick: when I click on a name in the Info window which has only 1 movie as a result, and then click on statistic, I get the statistic for that movie. But, alas, it only shows me that everyone is only once part of that movie - it doesn't show, how many movies of my collection share those names.)
And the next step would be to show such results in the Info window, next to the clickable names, like
Gary Cooper (5)
Jean Arthur (2).
Maybe that can't be done in HTML, maybe this would only work with a special "style".
But it would be so much better than having just each name clickable. (Another way to give hints would be to underline only those names with more than one result in the collection).

Well, I'm not a developer, maybe it's impossible or too much work to combine statistics and info window as described.
But for me this would be a highly appreciated feature, collecting all the data would suddenly make much more sense.

[Conor]

Thank you for the feedback. I understand exactly what your looking for and had not thought of a more complex map type view of connection between movies, this could be interesting way to browse. The way the database is built adding the number of movies after each actors name would not be efficient or easy to do. It's something we will take into account when we next do a serious upgrade to our database. The statistics are an aggregation of numbers for the collection (or the selection if more than one movie is selected) but does not show the links and similarities the movies would have.

[noribori]

Ok, a "complex map type view of connection between movies", that sounds very promising, much better than I expected.
I guess I'll just have to wait

And showing the aggregation of numbers for the whole collection in the statistics window, but only for the data of the selected movie, that would be too difficult?
Waiting would be a bit easier, if I could do that...

For the Gary Cooper problem: usually when I type a name in the search field, I add a quote sign before the name in order to find only the complete name. Like
"Gary Cooper
I tried to change your html-InfoTemplate for the Info Window to get that, but it's difficult. The line
[creditsBegin]<li><a href="pedia://bruji.com/filterBy=[credit:name]&field=credits">[credit:name]</a> : [credit:role]</li>[creditsEnd]
has already quotes, when I add a quote sign before the first [credit:name], the code is corrupted. Maybe you have a better idea how to get a search for the complete name?

[feja]

Thanks, I'll check all that out!!