I upgraded to trunk yesterday and have been fiddling with it for a good number of hours now.
I believe that the most important step for zenphoto now, is to make image flipping smooth (like slim/grey/light/dark/thick-box, simpleviewer or the tricasa hack) by default. By _default_ I mean that it must integrate nicely into the zenphoto structure of index.php / albums.php / image.php - which only tricasa manages (somewhat) so far.
Thus I integrated tricasa in the Default theme to see what needs to be done.
This works perfectly well:
Images are preloaded (and flipping between them is nothing short of impressive!).
Existing image descriptions are kept in sync with the images as we flip through.
These are the problems (and bugs):
- URL remain constant.
- Tricasa always flips from the first image no matter what image you actually start at.
- Comments, tags and EXIF remains static and is never updated.
- The image container size is static, so smaller images won't be centered.
(refreshing and linking wont work properly)
(eg. you'll always comment the first image you visit in a album, even if you're currently viewing another.)
(my default size is 800x600. A 600x800 image will be noticably missplaced at the far left side of the container)
The solution would be to make index.php an entirely ajaxified beast. With tricasa, we have images and descriptions fed to the page in realtime. If we had comments and EXIF data delivered like that too, we'd practically be done already. Of course, we need to keep the comment fields in sync too - so it adds comments to the correct image. (Perhaps a hidden field holding the image ID, so the server side comment code knows where to put it?)
I don't know if fiddling with the URL is within the powers of JS - but I could live without it anyway.
So... how difficult would this be to do? Is it possible at all?
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My gallery offers a fairly big sample set to see how tricasa behaves. You're free to browse around of course, but here's a few usefull links to save you time:
Album with image description
Album with image comments.