I’ve been trying to decide whether to use a script-based gallery to host and organize images or to just hand-code pages to display them. I want this site to be hands-on, have a consistent style from section to section, and especially be clean (meaning: very little overhead). On the other hand, I like the features of script-based solutions, though, like automatic thumbnails, categorization, and the ability for visitors to rate images and post comments.
So, I’m going to give Coppermine Photo Gallery a shot. I was interested in Gallery, but my web host uses Fantastico to install scripts, and it doesn’t appear to install Gallery properly. I tried a few of the suggestions suggested at their (Gallery’s) website, but eventually gave up and decided to try CPG.
I added the main categories I currently expect to use, added an album for the stuff that’s ready to upload, and then…uploaded said stuff to that album.
I’ll putz around with the PHP and CSS files tomorrow to see how tough it will be to make the image section (controlled by CPG) look like the rest of the site. I’m not thrilled that CPG uses tables to layout pages, so I might hack the files up so that they use CSS for this instead.
And then maybe I’ll scrap the current look of the site and re-do all the CSS… Who knows what this place will look like by the time anyone actually sees it.