Introduction to Gallery

1
Introduction to Gallery

• Bharat Mediratta
• July 25, 2002

2
What is Gallery

• Open Source PHP application
• Your photos on your website
• Provides similar functionality to commercial ASP
  products like Yahoo! Photos, Club Photo, PBASE

3
Brief History of Gallery

• Started May 2000, small development team
• Targeted at individual webmasters (me!)
• Installed on 20-30K websites today
• 200-300 new installs every day

4
Why Do You Need Gallery?

• You have a digital camera and you use it!
• You want the photos nicely integrated on your
  website
• You dont want to subject your visitors to
  advertising
• You dont trust dot coms with your data.

5
The Gallery 1.x Challenge

• Create an application with low barrier to entry
  to reach the broadest user base
• No database requirement
• Dont require custom PHP configuration (eg,
  compiled in GD, JPEG, PNG support)
• Dont require shell access to install
• Run on Unix and Windows
• Provide configuration wizard

6
The Tradeoffs

• No database ? concurrency issues
• External graphics library ? config issues

7
Gallery Configuration Security

• Problem
• Config wizard needs to create an output file,
  but we only want that file to be writeable at
  configuration time
• Solution (borrowed from Horde)
• Create scripts to switch Gallery between
  configuration and secure modes

8
Gallery Config Wizard Part 1

• Check out the users system

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Gallery Config Wizard Part 2

• Ask the user lots of questions and provide
  example answers

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Gallery Config Wizard Part 3

• Check the users answers!
• The sooner we find configuration problems, the
  less time the user wastes

11
Add photos!

• Log in
• Create a New Album
• Set Album title, URL, etc.
• Upload Photos from browser
• Slurp photos from another website

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Manage Photos

• Rotate images
• Automatically create thumbnails
• Resize images
• Cutomize thumbnails

13
Organize Albums

• Nested albums
• User permissions
• Optional Features
• Print Service
• Slideshow
• User Comments

14
Gallery Remote

• Java companion program
• Upload Photos using a rich interface

15
Customizing HTML Wrappers

• Use HTML wrappers to frame your Gallery, Albums,
  and Photos
• Wrappers canalso be used toadd
  functionality(like a ShoppingCart interface)

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Customizing Style Sheets

• Easily change the lookby modifying the
  Gallerystyle sheet

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Customizing Change the code

• The Open Source advantage Add all new
  functionality to Gallery by modifying the
  source code

18
Gallery and CMS/Portals

• PHP-Nuke and PostNuke
• Geeklog
• PhpBB2
• XOOPS

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Gallery E-commerce Plugins

• Use the HTML Wrappers to add
• Shopping cart
• Inventory integration
• Virtual post cards
• Print services

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Strengths

• Lightweight
• Easy to install
• Works in most environments
• Uncluttered interface
• Feature rich
• Good support community

21
Weaknesses

• Performance degrades in large Galleries
• Reliability issues
• greatly improved in newer versions
• No Internationalization
• No Templates
• Concurrency Problems

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Lessons Learned

• Hold the users hand (config wizard)
• Build a community!
• Release early, release often
• Accept and integrate user criticism

23
G2 The Future of Gallery

• Reliability, Scalability, Flexibility
• Templates
• Concurrency Support
• Relational Database support
• Better CMS Integration
• Internationalization
• Dynamic thumbnail generation

24
Questions