h0bbel.p0ggel.org

With the development of Gallery 3 well underway and in constant evolvement I'm thinking quite a lot about Photo Gallery theme development. I have some ideas about what I would like to do in a Gallery 3 theme, but nothing is decided as I have yet to sit down and actually try to design a mockup or anything.

So far it seems like the javascript library of choice in Gallery 3 will be jQuery which should make things a fair bit easier for me to work with. Also, the abundance of plugins available for jQuery is certain to help me out with adding some nice little effects to the final theme.

I'm looking forward to theming Gallery 3 as the theme system matures, so far it's looking very good and the current incarnation should make it fairly easy to get started with Gallery 3 theming. Hopefully this means that we will see a lot of great themes produced in the time ahead!

For now though, I would like to ask for inspiration. Do you know of a great photo gallery theme that you would like to show me? It doesn't have to be css/html only, flash based sites work for inspiration as well even if my theme most certainly won't be flash based at all.

So, what do you say? Want to help me find inspiration for a great Gallery 3 theme?

So, in a true Halloween spirit a new monster has been released to the general public. Ok, it might not be a monster just yet, but the aim is to get a "production use" Gallery 3 product ready for general release on February 1st 2009.

Check out the current code via SVN:
svn co http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/trunk gallery3

More details are available on the Gallery-Devel mailinglist.

The countdown has begun, T-92 days to go.

So, today Microsoft, and Ray Ozzie, unveiled the Azure Services Platform. At first I didn't really think much of it, nor really investigate what they were up to this time. It all sounded a bit to Microsofty and to be honest not all that interesting for the normal Windows system admin. I mean, it's probably a good service and I'm sure there is lots of developers who will enjoy working with it and store their data in the Microsoft Cloud.

Then, Chris Kelly pointed me to a Port 25 posting about Azure. It goes into details as to what the service is, and how they envision people using it. Basically it's a way to use computational resources on Microsoft servers, like storage, SQL services and so on. I'm sure a lot of pretty cool services will come out of this, but I still didn't quite see why I should look into it in more detail. I did keep reading though, and much to my surprise, I found the following passage:

• A developer using the Eclipse IDE can write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure
• Gallery, the leading PHP photo application, can access Windows Azure cloud storage
• A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.

Specific to Gallery, we've done two simple things: we created wrappers to convert the Windows Azure API to PHP objects, and we created a Windows Azure subclass inherited from the Windows NT Platform class. The net of all this is that, with a small amount of code, we were able to connect one of the top PHP application to Windows Azure, specifically, photo images stored as BLOBs in the cloud.

Uhm, what?! Microsoft took Gallery and created a Azure subclass to create cloud based storage for Gallery 2?! How neat is that?

I mean, I knew about the Web Platform Installer and it's Gallery support, but I don't think anyone knew about this until now.

Oh, and by the way, Microsoft has also added OpenID support for Live ID. I wonder whatever happened to the Passport idea...

Over the last few days, most of the Gallery developers has been doing a 'Gx Coding Sprint' in Google's Mountain View location. The purpose of the sprint was to reach an agreement on the road ahead, and to get started on the new version of Gallery.

Sadly I was not able to attend, but they seem to have managed fine without me (No surprises there)! So far, Bharat has outlined the road ahead in a Gallery-Devel thread. Read the whole thing for the details, but the gist of it is this:

• Name: Gallery 3 (surprise!)
• Framework: Kohana
• Supported Environment: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL 5, PHP 5)

Basically this comes down to acknowledging that Gallery 2 has become to large and to all-embracing to be effective at what it does. Gallery 3 will try to rectify this.

While I have no experience with Kohana at all, I'm really looking forward to working on this. It promises to be a lot of fun and I hope to be able to really contribute to making Gallery 3 a huge success. Now, lets get a fully functional external API ready and I'll try to make sure that there is a Habari Silo available for it as well.
After all, the Silo's look great and does a fantastic job when publishing content.

Microsoft has announces their Web Platform Installer beta (Web PI) and it includes Gallery support!

I haven't tested this yet, but Web PI should make it much easier to install, amongst others, Gallery on your IIS 7 with FastCGI and PHP.

Gallery even has it's own download page on microsoft.com

Seems like something I need to play with ASAP.