2 replies to this topic

[mikef]

First, a little background (or 'how I got to be here'):
In the autumn of 2005 I was looking for a CMS for two sites I wanted to build (one for a local charity, and one to replce my own aging site).
I had two requirements:

• it had to have a gallery that I thought I'd be able to understand and build on
  
• it had to give control over the site appearance.

The combination of etogal and etomite seemed to give me that, so I downloaded them, learnt how they worked (and how to write PHP code!) and built the first of the sites (for the charity). I knew that etogal didn't have the flexibility to cover everything that I wanted to do and so originally talked to hgelmopf (the author) about developing a fork, but we eventually decided that it would be better if I could build on etogal, rather than have two separate but similar gallery snippets.
I added support to etogal for image descriptions, and then set about building the additional snippets I needed.

The etogal snippet suite currently consists of &#91

five[/s] four snippets]

• EtoGal is the primary component, and can be used without the others. It provides all the admin functions for the gallery (adding, editting and deleting images), and an initial set of display options for the gallery. It was designed and built by hugelmopf, with some later additions from mikef and others.
  
• EtoGalList generates a list of all images managed by EtoGal, and outputs the result according to a user defined style. (Styles to match ListSiteMap (as used in the efikim sitemap page) and GoogleSiteMap_XML are include in the snippet.)
  
• EtoGalSrch was the first of the client snippets, and extends the standard etomite search function to look through the etogal table and return images that match the search criteria amongst the results. (It also does the same for blogger, as a result of a request from a user of both.)
  
• EtoGalThumb allows the selection of a number of images, and displays them according to user defined styles (several of which are predefined in the snippet). This snippet is responsible for the majority of image displays in the Lower Moss Wood site and for the gallery previews in my site (efikim). It is very flexible in formats that can be displayed, the data that can be displayed, and how it links to other pages or images, and in the latest version can also display full sized images rather than thumbnails.
  
• EtoGalGallery is the latest addition, and extends EtoGalThumb to allow the display of a group of images in gallery mode, with a full size image, navigation, and thumbnail display. Images may be selected for inclusion by gallery id or image id (and images from more than one gallery may be included)

The additional snippets differ from the EtoGal snippet in several ways:

• they are not standalone, and are useless without the etogal snippet being used somewhere on the site (though etogal need not be used on any of the pages visible to the normal website user)
  
• they are not limited to displaying images from a single gallery on a single page
  
• if displaying images from a gallery they need not display all images
  
• it is hopefully easier to modify the displays they generate, than by adding more display options to EtoGal itself, once the underlying mechanism is understood. In many cases little or no knowledge of PHP is required, though you do need to be able to write HTML code.

(editted purely to bump back to top of pinned list!)

Edited by mikef, 27 May 2007 - 04:52 PM.

[mikef]

EtoGalList is being withdrawn, as EtoGalThumb can provide the same output with suitable styles.

[mikef]

bump!