Zenphoto

First, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 fairly smoothly, and I have to ask, how exactly did they manage to make the admin interface uglier than it was before? I don’t mean to be harsh… I like most of the rest of it–except the image upload addition–it will drive me to create a ZP-WP plugin to replace it ASAP.

Anyway, zenphoto development has been very active recently. You can all thank Todd Papaioannou for his hard work on drag-n-drop sorting. Take a look at his posts describing the new features on his site. I think I can improve the interface a bit, but the functionality is all there and working beautifully.

We’re planning on a release early next week with sorting, image and album deletion in the control panel, e-mail comment notification, and possibly RSS as well. Keep checking (...)

Read more

Upon seeing this post by John Berry at Agile Partners, (through Michael Heilemann, thanks!) I couldn’t resist applying it to an actual photo album.

Without further ado, here’s a zenphoto theme that uses a Scriptaculous slider to resize photos, just like iPhoto.

Slidaculous Resizing Zenphoto

Credit where credit is due: I copied the code exactly as written in John’s post, then modified it for a little extra efficiency, and used zenphoto’s size-in-the-URL trick to progressively load higher resolutions as you slide. Yeah, I did say that. Try it out.

This is a testament to zenphoto’s flexibility. There’s no reason one couldn’t continue to add more scriptaculous effects.

• Removed web_path and server_path config variables. They are now automatically deduced (and there was much rejoicing).
• Added theme functions: getPrevImageThumb() and getNextImageThumb() - return the path
  to the thumbnail of the previous or next image relative to the current image.
• Fixed bugs with using next_image() (for iterating through all album images) on an image page. You should now be able to use any loop anywhere without affecting the state.
• [Bug 005102] Images smaller than the standard image size will not be sized up anymore.
• [Bug 005125] AJAX-editing no longer strips HTML from titles/descriptions.
• [Bug 005086] Using zenphoto without mod_rewrite should work fine now.

Thank you all for the wonderful response to the release of the zenphoto beta (read the post below, or go to zenphoto.org to grab it).

zenphoto support forums

Of course, like any beta release, it’s a bit hard to install, and is pretty inconsistent over different platforms, so I’ve opened up the forums so you can get help easier and faster. If you need help, just start a new thread there. If you want to help give support, please create an account and start helping people out. I’d appreciate it greatly.

There were a few common installation problems people have experienced:

• The ‘albums’ directory cannot be found or is not readable means that you have your ’server_path’ variable wrong. This thread shows how to find out the right (...)

Read more

• Fixed bugs in setup script causing instructions not to be shown.
• (Note: 0.8.2 was a fix for a syntax error in 0.8.1 that I hope no one saw)

• Finalized default theme.
• Admin: Added ability to choose which image to use for the album thumbnail.
• More bugfixes.

Relevant links:

• trisweb.com - zenphoto 0.8 developer release

Available at zenphoto.org.

Wow that felt good. It took me a while to realize what I was actually doing, but then when I uploaded the front page of zenphoto.org and looked at the domain in the address bar, it hit me.

It’s not 100% as complete as I wanted for 1.0, but it’s pretty darn good, and definately good enough to use and to start making themes for. Speaking of which, theme developers: I’ll have some documentation up soon, but until then, just look at how the two included themes are built and you should be able to figure it out. If you know PHP, the template-functions.php will be good to look at.

So, with that, I leave it to you. Remember that this is a developer release, and as such I won’t be supporting it much. I’m trying to get a support forum set up so you can help each other out.

If you get it installed and working, leave a comment here with a link (if you want) and a (...)

Read more

• Admin: Checked-in Joen's design.
• Default Theme: new RC from Joen; for admins, added "edit comment" and "admin" links.
• Default Theme: gave all thumbnails width/height so floating DIVs line up properly before load.
• Many small changes and bugfixes.

Needless to say, school has started and like I knew all along, development on ZP has slowed. I swear I want to get this first release out soon, but I just can’t make promises anymore. I have so many other things which are so unfortunately more important.

That said, I have tomorrow off, so maybe I’ll finish it all.

I have made several updates, including the ability to select the thumbnail for the album from its images, with a preview in 100% CSS-styled listbox goodness. The preview doesn’t work in Internet Explorer, but frankly, neither should you.

Also included are all sorts of updates to the admin control panel from Joen which I forgot to include in the last version.

zenphoto 0.6.1 (admin)

Note: You may have to delete the zenphoto cookie from trisweb.com to log in, since I changed the cookie to remember multiple logins on multiple ZP installs on the same (...)

Read more

Joen’s theme for the upcoming zenphoto is complete, so check out his post on the usability and design strategies he incorporated into it.

I figured I should show it in action, so I’ve uploaded the latest zenphoto to the usual place, which is full of some great new design.

No, it’s not done yet. Look, I’m on 0.6, and I’ve got 0.7-0.9 to go before I can call it 1.0! ;-) If you want to see exactly how much left there is, look at the list, and please tell me if there are things in for 1.0 you don’t care about so I can put them off until later.

Also, while I remember, I prefer the spelling “zenphoto”, though I really don’t care if you capitalize and add spaces.

Also, if you’re looking for an amazing new album to listen to, get Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens (...)

Read more