I am thinking of writing a Gallery mod of WordPress. Here are some thoughts as I mull over them. I have kept in mind my own programming prowess, time limitations, limited modification of the WordPress source code. This is more of a functional specification.
1) Upload of files has to be streamlined and simplified somehow. I am thinking of using the method used by Gallery. In other words, you create a folder called albums in your root directory, create a folder for an album, and upload all your pictures to that folder using FTP. The upload interface inside the admin will also allow individual uploads but only for a limited number of files. FTP is preferred.
2) An “album”, in my opinion, could be just a category. That keeps things simple and within the WP framework. That way, the default display would show the latest posted category, which is a nicely formatted list of thumbnails from within that “album”. Outside the default display, photographs could be browsed singly. Each photograph is a single entry into the structure. The category or album display would show the excerpts for the posts instead of the full content when listing the items in that category.
3) The excerpts would contain the markup for the thumbnails. The body of the post would contain one custom meta field which would have the EXIF information extracted from the picture. The body itself would contain the markup for the resized image and the link to the original image. The title of each post would contain the topic/description of each photograph.
4) The “Write” part of the admin will be modified. Once the pictures have been uploaded (either through the admin or through FTP and the pictures are loaded into WP, single button click) the pictures are presented in a single page for addition of description. This single page is going to be tricky to come up with because of the multiple posts. If someone has a better idea, please leave a comment. Once all the pictures have been modified, they are finally posted to the database. I believe that there should be enough memory in a default PHP install to do this effectively, but I might be wrong. I have to test it out.
5) So in the end, we have a photo gallery. The default display shows either a list of the categories or the albums, or shows the latest album in all its glory. In the category display, only the excerpt is shown, thus only clickable thumbnails are displayed. Once you either click on the topic of a category, you get permalinked posts in all their glory.
Thoughts?
Great, exactly what I would have asked for the uploading of photos i.e. create a new dir for the new album and drop stuff in it. Infact with WP’s default ability to create keywords and values for posts I see the photos having a lot meta info attached like Adobe Photo Albums tags.
Will wait for your implementaion when ever you do it.
Pankaj
Hi Mark, I have your wp pictorialis working but I really need to change a few things so it works a bit like a gallery with comments. Just need a way to show all categories, not necessarily all photos and show all thumbs for a category instead of previous-posts as it is now.
Sorry to write on this post, but I’m a bit desperate! thanks for your help…
I had used Gallery for quite some time just seperately. It’s a real mess to config to look correctly. =/
I use singapore with WP. After looking into several photoblogs I liked this one the most because it was very clean looking, easy to style and use. plus what I really like about it is that I can use it completely via a web-interface (good to setup my folks with it, whom I don’t want to give FTP access to the server). What I don’t like is that it doesn’t use a MySQL database (it stores the file in some metafile within each photo directory) and if I go in via FTP I get all the time CHMOD problems which I have to fix (because everything gets created via www as owner). One can upload complete folders in one go (zipped) or single ones, one can add text but doesn’t have to – I’ve created some buttons in the quicktags.php file which will link a blog thumb image directly to the fullsize image within the photodirectory. I think something like Singapore just more integrated with WP would be great.
Sounds great to me!! I use Gallery on a private family site and use WP there as well. It would be great to integrate the to together… Hopefully you’ll be able to figure out the authentication bits as well…
Acually, it seems like a complete enough mod to have it’s own admin panel. There you could handle the posting and listing for editing album posts. Also it seems a category of ‘Albums’ with subcategories would be the way to go. Contact me if you’d like to collaborate on something like this.
That would be wonderful kitten! I was hoping to have someone like you on board to share the work with! 🙂
Just thinking some more about this… as a user not a developer.
Where will this go as far as display on WP sites? I’d like to see a nice pull from Gallery and display similar to the TypePad photoblogs, but perhpas a notch above since WP is a “bit” more flexible.
I’ll go away now and let those who can, really think about these matters. 🙄
Why not do something really different? Sounds a lot like “Coppermine” which is very nice warez. Or maybe intergrate Wp and coppermine?