After a successful Mad Pride gig – from which there are some photos – I realised we maybe needed some kind of gallery software.
There are loads – Coppermine, ZenPhoto – and this one Gallery2. Dreamhost has this as a one-click install so its going to be good (I’m now trusting Dreamhost’s judgement.
Right – straight away the full install takes 50Mb of space – which is huge for an online app. That makes me very suspicious this is bloatware.
And it is. But it is very widely used. Trouble is when you have a vast army of people working on an app it gets like Windows – more and more things get added – it becomes unwieldy – much more likely to go wrong in ways which are insoluble.
And it is not very fast.
There are some pro’s though. The carbon theme used here does look nice.
You can have people uploading. It will embed in WordPress and phpBB. Plus its not just for photos anymore – but will do video and hopefully flash audio as well – certainly does mp3’s.
Okay keep it under review. The other one to try out is ZenPhoto. Much smaller and trades on the fact it isn’t bloatware.
Another plus is that with some hackery – Gallery2 will work with the magnificent javascript tool Highslide. That is a winning piece of software.
But building the madpride header, menu and footer into Gallery is by no means easy and resultant code is a horrible horrible mish mash. Gallery uses loads of .tpl files which are written in Smarty. Smarty doesn’t play nice with javascript, html functions or php.
Have a stylesheet which removes Gallery2’s header and logo by setting display to none. Sheesh.
However I suppose I have to get to grips with Smarty – because phpBB (forums uses it and editing tpl files is a must.) Therefore Gallery2 is good practice.