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Thursday, 05 January 2006, 14:47:40 EST

Well, I have actually started working on a new gallery script. I searched for one that would meet my needs several times during my winter break. I found several that would have worked well functionality wise, but they either had horrible navigation systems, horrible visual design, or both. I almost caved in and used Zenphoto, but, for reasons already mentioned, and its inability to disable comments except through editing the templates, I decided against it. I had actually given up on the whole idea all together but I just couldn't get it out of my head. Monday night, while trying to get to sleep, I had several ideas for the project and immediately got out of bed and typed them up. They seemed simple to implement at first; indeed, I decided to take on the project because I felt I had boiled the problem down to a very simple implementation, but as I have been working on it the past two days it has grown in complexity. The idea remains simple: stick the pictures in directories, and sub-directories, and let the PHP script dynamically build the gallery as the user navigates it. This means that the gallery wouldn't require some clunky upload system, the files can just be uploaded with an ftp client or whatever else, and there wouldn't be any need for a database of any kind (initially). I do have some features in mind that require a database to implement but I don't deem them important enough for a first release (or do I?). So where has the difficulty arisen? The difficult part is reading the albums, and any sub-albums, from the disk. So far, it is requiring more loops than I wanted, though I have trimmed them down, and I haven't started on the sub-album code, or even listing the pictures, yet. I have essentially built the skeleton of the program thus far and now need to put some flesh on it. I haven't been feeling 100% the past couple days so work has been slow. If I am feeling better tomorrow, I might be able to complete most of it.

I haven't decided yet if I am going to release the final product. "Themeing" the thing is easy and hard at the same time. A lot of the markup is generated in the navigation javascript and not easily changed. If you are willing to live with my markup, then themeing is easily done via CSS. The markup really isn't bad; it just isn't what a lot of people would be expecting. If, when I get done and post my personal gallery, you all decide you like it I could probably be easily persuaded to release it. I need to think of a good name for it though, because "Jasu Photo Gallery" is really, really, lame. And I would need a good logo...