I'm coming from a php/mysql background. I'm most familiar with the Kohana PHP framework and I'm trying to learn Docpad. I have a loose understand at this point and I've built out my first website and blog. Static content makes a lot of sense to me on Docpad.
I'm working on my photography site where I want to be able to upload new images to a portfolio. The backend needs to handle an uploaded high-resolution image and create several different copies at different resolutions of the image. My biggest question is how do I keep track of the image meta data that I want to display? Do I generate a physical file for each image that has all the particulars I want to track and use those files as my searchable database, much like how blog posts are setup?
Or should I go the route of using something like MongoDB to store image data there where it can be queried and plugged into a layout?
Regarding handling POST or GET data, should I be reading up on the express.js docs? I'm not really sure where to turn for that.
Wordpress uses TimThumb to re-size it's images: How does WordPress.com resize images dynamically?
Then there is this re-sizing library for node: node package for file attachments and image resizing
If you wanted to created like 3 different image sizes and use the backbone collection in DocPad, then you'd add your different re-sized images to those three different collections/folders. For access the images you might just be able to do it via it's file name. So when you copy, re-size and rename the image, in the rename step, concat the image size at the end, like: coolPhoto-med.jpg and then you could just do hard links to get to the image like /spring-collection/med/coolPhoto-med.jpg or you could use query engine to access them.
The file model has a meta attribute: https://github.com/bevry/docpad/blob/master/src/lib/models/file.coffee#L17 I've yet to learn how to use it yet though.
I know we chatted yesterday on #docpad IRC but I just wanted to answer you here too. If you do code something that re-sizes images for DocPad, please do consider putting it up on Github to share with the community.