Pretend you need a gallery that is:

A.) Simple enough for a designer to completely customize the layout of without learning a complicated API.
B.) Doesn’t need a heavy login/plugin/module system (only need 1 user to manage it)
C.) Can password protect categories if needed
D.) Can upload files both via the web and via FTP (To a specific upload directory for later processing)..

What other features would you like to see?

My current design document looks something like this:

Obviously, this WebApp is being created utilizing the CodeIgniter framework.

I have some prototype code for some of the features (Specifically, the templating tool)

-Geoff W.

Are you going to release the code?

Absolutely.

I’m simply looking for input on features that people would like to see.

The intention is to create something that is similar to Gallery/Gallery2, but far lighter and simpler to deal with/modify/template.

ok, then I would go for php4 support

Sounds like a cool project to me. Perhaps yours will be to Gallery/Coppermine what Vanilla is to phpBB?

PHP 4 probably is a good idea.

The FTP+Web uploading sounds good to me, although with FTP you usually have to go in eventually and add titles/other meta data to the image.

Also, any complete, functioning system made available to the community is such a great help to newbies who want to see that sort of thing. So I’d focus on great documentation within the code, and a great user guide to support it. A lot of good CI libraries lack those two things.

Keep us updated.

Yeah, the idea behind the FTP uploading is to avoid the limitations on upload file sizes that some hosts restrict you to - upload via FTP and post-process the images in the administrative inteface.

Realistically, I still develop for PHP4.. for the most part, I’ve only used one or two specific PHP5 features in any script I’ve ever written. Hence, it’ll work fine w/ a PHP4-based host.

And Colin - I am one of those newbies, so you’ll probably see a lot of questions from me in the near future as I get deeper into the development of this application.

And yes - I’m hoping this will be the “light” style of gallery/coppermine. My biggest hope is to eventually grow this project into something that may have 1-2 additional core developers with a path for users to submit their own functionality (and have it incorporated if it passes unit testing/validation)

I’ve actually been doing PHP Development since ~1999 (as a hobby, still is), just never got into the OO-based design/development realm of things.

CI is a great codebase to learn OO patterns and practices. You’re definitely in the right place.

Regarding the FTP idea, is not bad, but i would take a different approach.

Let the user/designer upload the images via ftp and store them in a temp folder, then provide an interface to import files from that folder into the system using your settings.

This have the obvious benefit of keeping control of the content imported, regardless of what has been uploaded by the user.

I’ve been using this approach for a long time now and found t to be the best of both world, you still allow ftp uploads, but keep control over the system.

Trust me, you will have users trying to import a pdf file into a gallery arguing that they can see and image inside

marcoss, we took that approach with kentuckyderby.com and it worked pretty well. It involves one more step, but makes sense from a control perspective.

In this case, it makes sense for that to be an option though:

* publish FTP uploaded files immediately
* require manual publishing of FTP uploads
* disable/ignore FTP uploads

Shouldn’t be too difficult to program for.

The (expanded) idea for FTP Uploads covers that, pretty much.

User uploads images to a temporary storage location (/glrn_ftp_images/)

User logs into the administrative interface after the upload is complete
selects (for instance): Process FTP Images

Images are processed (Resized, etc).
Paginated reloads with thumbs of all images.
Any “comment” data is set there along with the selection of the gallery the image should appear in.
->Submit

Done.

My user-logic may be off on that, but it’s tough for me to build an interface - I suck with html and i suck even worse at decent UI design.

awpti - 24 June 2007 10:33 AM

My user-logic may be off on that, but it’s tough for me to build an interface - I suck with html and i suck even worse at decent UI design.

Okay in that case you can try the following flow,

* FTP Upload.
* Image Processing (delete non-images files, resize and make thumbs).
* Display thumbs along with data-fields (Flickr-Style)
* Save Changes

That’s easy to code and uses a simple UI that even you can code