I’ve finally updated my artwork gallery using the great Zenphoto CMS.
(for those who don’t know yet, I create 3D illustrations as an hobby)
I thought I’d share a concise review about Zenphoto now that I’m familiar with it.
Plus
What I particularly loved
- It is easily skinnable (if you have decent CSS/XHTML skills)
- It is very user-friendly for administrators: you can modify your descriptions and tags on the go if you’re logged in, without switching to the admin interface.
- The image management is just GREAT. It keeps your original image on your server, so whenever you change the dimensions of your images (let’s say if you’re planning a redesign) it adapts right away to your new dimensions (provided your original is big enough).
- There is a function that allows you to automatically add a watermark. You can upload you own PNG watermark (which can also be changed later without you having to re-upload everything).
- It has some cool features such as very functional tags, tag cloud and an RSS feed.
Minus
What I didn’t enjoy at all
- There is no function to move an image from one category to another, which is pretty BAD: you have to reupload and refill your details if you want to do the switch.
- It does not completely validate due to “&” not being hardcoded in URLs (plus several other minor errors).
- The RSS feed keeps track of the latest uploaded images. I expected it would sort the images by date.
Overall…
I would say I enjoy Zenphoto and recommend it, provided some of the features I mentioned will be added/corrected.
Hi,
I’ve recently have to work with Gallery 2.2 which required some hacks to fit my client needs.
What is great about it: you can modify every single template in a non destructive way (which means that upgrading it won’t break everything). Templates are made using Smarty, hard to debug but easy to reuse. You can do a throw everything away and build your own theme and this is great!
Gallery 2.3 (which isn’t stable yet) will get even better at creating deeper modified themes.
One bad point for Zen Photo, it seems very similar to WordPress (which is a true pain to hack on).
Most of the people need exactly what ZenPhoto or Gallery does but with on little thing different. Being able to say: “say, no worries” matters important imho.
Disclaimer: I don’t know ZenPhoto, and have a pretty poor experience with Gallery.
I used Jimmac’s original too, which is build as a client script and php pages on the server (for old or cheap hosting platform).
Cheers,
– Yoan
Hi Yoan, many thanks for your input.
I agree with you that mostly, clients need slightly different (or even very new) functionalities.
I haven’t tried to hack into Zenphoto at all yet, however (fortunately, my first client using it liked it “as is”).
I’m hoping that this gallery will develop in order to have a flourishing community (which will happily bring new hacks and add-ons ;).
BTW, I had never heard about Jimmac’s Original. I’m going to look at it, thanks!