alexyacoub.com

For the past few years, I’ve been using Menalto’s Gallery software to display the photos on my website. After months of struggling with the newest versions to get them to look how I want and have the features I want, I’ve given up. I’m pretty impressed with the interface and features that Flickr has, as well as the API they offer. So I’ve decided to use the FAlbum plugin to Wordpress to display my photos on my site from Flickr.

I haven’t decided what to do with my old gallery. Right now it’s still up, in a general state of disrepair. I’ll probably transfer over a lot of my photos to Flickr slowly, but I’ll also likely still keep the old gallery up.

Falbum is a decent plugin. I made some serious changes to it though. I’ve emailed the developer to try to submit my patches, but he never got back to me. For the curious:

• I added a “hybrid” view in addition to the album view and the recent photos view. This is basically just a copy of the interface that Flickr uses for a user’s main photo page.
• In addition to that, I made a lot of changes to the code so that the photo display page could better figure out where it came from and where to go back to.
• I added an option in the plugin configuration to choose which of the three display modes should be the default.
• I added an option in the plugin configuration to choose the default sort order.
• I cleaned up the photo display code and took out a lot of the pagination code, some of which was a little buggy. Instead, I added the /with/ style URL that Flickr uses into the hybrid and recent photo code. This is a less buggy pagination, and lets the pagination code only get run when absolutely necessary (it’s generally requires a lot of API calls).

There are a few bugs left in there, and some features I’d like to add. If I were doing it over again, I’d remove a couple features from the plugin, but it seems other want them, so I just worked around a few bugs they introduce. The main bug is that the default flickr query for photos only returns a maximum of 500 photos, so those people with more can run up against pagination and display problems. I’m sure my code is a little buggy too, so let me know if you run across anything nasty.

I was hoping to create a cleaner patch and send it back to the developer. In the meantime, if anyone wants to get the patch, just leave a comment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.