Okay. There has been a lot of talk about galleries for SMF/SMF TP and most popular seems to be SMF Gallery (Lite). Why? Because it fits very nicely to SMF's themes..
Coppermine comes second. It's much better than SMF gallery just because of it's amazing features. Here's some cons and pros of coppermine when compared to smf gallery (these are mainly my opinions):
+ great amount of settings
+ possibility to edit pictures (crop, rotate, etc)
+ more flexible.
+ possibility of separate user gallery section where every user is able to have a sub-category where they can create their own albums and so on, when smf gallery lite does not give this possibility.
- Quite difficult to embed to smf or smftp.. IFrames really do suck :( I tried to have automaticly resizing iframe but that wasn't good, and when I finally got it work as good as possible, it still sucked, I tested it on another platforms and on apple's os x's safari and in mac's ie, iframe did resize when it was supposed to grow it's length. But shrinking did not work.. I don't know if it works in opera or good only knows how many other browsers will fail with that stuff. Also I was already tired of it when I noticed that it must grow also it's width and that really sucked on safari (as once again, it didn't shrink)
- Theme looks awful when it's embedded to smf or smf+tp..
Okay, I found a theme for coppermine that makes it look.. well a bit like smf.. But that theme wasn't really that good..
So I started to make my own, it was a huge job and theme stuff isn't that flexible so it can't be made to look completely like SMF's theme.. But parts visible to user look now pretty nice and most of stuff that doesn't look completely like core theme are visible only for administrator (there was no theming available (except for css part) for admin stuff)
This theme became quite a big finally and there's still some cleaning that I need to do for it.. But while I was at it, I also made my smf/smftp theme to show Pictures button in navigation bar that will lead to gallery, and then I ditched the idea of an iframe..
It uses a php file in smf's Sources directory as a header.. I left out SMF's footer as coppermine's footer is fine as it is.. So check it out:
http://roadrunner.cx:81/ (http://roadrunner.cx:81/)
Click pictures to go to gallery.. Sorry for stupid pictures and some content is in finnish, I kinda use this forum for testing while developing stuff and didn't intend it to be public in the first place but I'm too lazy to setup another site..
It's not complete yet, I still need to do one change in the source file (load tp's language file _only_ if tp exists!) and then some cleanup..
But anyway, if people are interested in it, I might be willing to make it a MOD for SMF..
and ofcourse publish my theme for coppermine in here :)
Then installation would be easy as this:
- Install my SMFTP theme for coppermine
- Install my MOD
- Set coppermine to use header ../Sources/Coppermine.php
Okay, smf gallery (lite) still is about to beat coppermine, why?
My theme _only_ supports core/default theme of smf.. But maybe this would start something? People could use my theme as a startup point for creating support for other themes, right? I used already existing SMF theme for coppermine as a starting point for this project..
So, is there any use for this, or should I stop wasting my time and do something else? :o
I also had another thing in my my mind..
SMF Gallery Lite is free.. So it could be modified to have some features from pro (sub-categories, quotas according to users group and rating) and by adding some features to it like rotation of picture and resize, it could be great, but when I checked it's source I kinda lost my interest to that idea..
edit: and it could be ethically wrong as if commercial features would be added to a fork of lite version, this could harm business of smfhacks, so maybe better not to interfere..
Okay, there's a demo version running at
http://test.roadrunner.cx:81/ (http://test.roadrunner.cx:81/) and I'm done with testing and with development, so I am about to pack this now to a MOD and a theme..
As nobody didn't care to comment it, I have decided that nobody didn't want to change anything it to make it better and so it must be as perfect as possible.
When I have published it, I hope other people will edit this smftp theme to suit other themes, for e.g. Mesh TP theme is very nice theme, it took me about a month to create this package so I'm done with it now as I have other projects I need to continue too..
It's now published here:
http://www.tinyportal.net/index.php?topic=16771.msg138643 (http://www.tinyportal.net/index.php?topic=16771.msg138643)
Newest version always here (as soon as it's approved by SMF):
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=848
Thanks jake1981, I think it's a great idea and I'm planning to use this on my sites. :up:
Quote from: Svaha on June 19, 2007, 11:02:03 AM
Thanks jake1981, I think it's a great idea and I'm planning to use this on my sites. :up:
No problem, if it's get to even one site, I can be proud of myself :)