More progress on the website

An article by Rachel    Comments Off

Two weeks ago, I listed a couple of things I wanted to accomplish with this website. I’ve managed to accomplish number 1 and number 3. Its a miracle.

PHP includes: When I started this website, I knew that it had to be easy to maintain. I knew enough about web development to create shtml pages. My navigation menu and footer were included in the web pages through a txt file include. It worked well until I started to create some PHP pages. PHP ignored my txt includes.

My PHP skills are pretty much non-existant. So I borrowed a PHP book from a co-worker, found the necessary instructions, and created a new index.php file. Voila! It worked. My navigation menu and footer are included in every page by includes. In fact, I created the footer in Movabletype. This gave me the capability to include MT fields in the footer. I’m fairly pleased with myself.

Dynamic Photo Gallery: Implementing my photo gallery was a large project. I began by comparing my available options to my needs. I decided my greatest needs were a gallery that could have the same look as the rest of my site, an easy method to upload and link photos, and an optional login for select photo albums.

SimpleViewer was the first photo gallery that I looked at. It creates simple albums that run through flash. It is xml based. I liked its simplicity and the flash look and feel. While it didn’t offer a login, I actullay tried to implement this option. I abandoned it when it became difficult fit inside my look and feel. Also I decided I really wanted more functionality.

A quick search on the internet led me to two more viable options: a Photoblog and Gallery. I decided to go with Gallery. It had all the features that I wanted. Before I begin describing my adventures with Gallery, I believe that the photoblog idea is great. It would be easy to implent if you already knew how to create a blog.

Gallery installed just like the instructions described. I give kudos to the development team for creating and documenting an easy install. My satisfaction with the look and feel didn’t even last 5 seconds. I started to look in the forums for information on customizations. Before I knew it I found instructions.

These instructions are great with a couple of minor exceptions. If you are using Gallery version 1.5 or greater, the file names are different. Modify wrapper.header and wrapper.footer instead of gallery.header and gallery.footer. This will propograte your changes to all the pages in Gallery. If you don’t change these pages, you’ll need to change a lot of individual pages. This will save you a lot of time.

Version 1.5 no longer uses embedded_style.css. Instead it uses base.css and screen.css. Make your css changes in these files. Before I discovered the new css files, I was ready to give up. I played with the wrapper files and css files for about an hour to get my look and feel implemented. I really pleased with the results.

Now that I’ve got my blog and photo gallery working, I’m going to concentrate on posting actual content. I do have a sock that needs to make it debut.