Introduction to Gallery

Bharat Mediratta

July 25, 2002

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

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

Why Do You Need Gallery?

• You have a digital camera – and you use it!

• You want the photos nicely integrated on your website

• You don’t want to subject your visitors to advertising

• You don’t trust dot coms with your data.

The Gallery 1.x Challenge

• Create an application with low barrier to entry to reach the broadest user base:– No database requirement– Don’t require custom PHP configuration (eg,

compiled in GD, JPEG, PNG support)– Don’t require shell access to install– Run on Unix and Windows– Provide configuration wizard

The Tradeoffs

• No database concurrency issues

• External graphics library config issues

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

Gallery Config Wizard Part 1

• Check out the user’s system

Gallery Config Wizard Part 2

• Ask the user lots of questions and provide example answers

Gallery Config Wizard Part 3

• Check the user’s answers!– The sooner we find configuration problems, the

less time the user wastes

Add photos!

• Log in

• Create a New Album

• Set Album title, URL, etc.

• Upload Photos from browser

• Slurp photos from another website

Manage Photos

• Rotate images

• Automatically create thumbnails

• Resize images

• Cutomize thumbnails

Organize Albums

• Nested albums

• User permissions

• Optional Features:– Print Service– Slideshow– User Comments

Gallery Remote

• Java companion program

• Upload Photos using a rich interface

Customizing: HTML Wrappers

• Use HTML wrappers to frame your Gallery, Albums, and Photos

• Wrappers canalso be used toadd functionality(like a ShoppingCart interface)

Customizing: Style Sheets

• Easily change the lookby modifying the Gallerystyle sheet

Customizing: Change the code

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

Gallery and CMS/Portals

• PHP-Nuke and PostNuke

• Geeklog

• PhpBB2

• XOOPS

Gallery E-commerce Plugins

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

Strengths

• Lightweight

• Easy to install

• Works in most environments

• Uncluttered interface

• Feature rich

• Good support community

Weaknesses

• Performance degrades in large Galleries

• Reliability issues– greatly improved in newer versions

• No Internationalization

• No Templates

• Concurrency Problems

Lessons Learned

• Hold the user’s hand (config wizard)

• Build a community!

• Release early, release often

• Accept and integrate user criticism

G2: The Future of Gallery

• Reliability, Scalability, Flexibility

• Templates

• Concurrency Support

• Relational Database support

• Better CMS Integration

• Internationalization

• Dynamic thumbnail generation

Questions