dummied

Zenphoto 1.0.1 (beta)

At a glance

This entry was written on January 20, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled Odds and ends.

The entry following this is entitled Set it and forget it.

There are 0 comments on this post.

This entry has been tagged as Blogs, Reviews, XHTML, mysql, php.

Archives are also available.

I have been steadily working on a wedding website for my sister's upcoming nuptials. It's mostly finished (but not ready for prime time just yet ... you'll have to settle for the very small view of an album page until it's complete), complete with a page for driving directions to the church and reception, a page with little bios and photos of the wedding party, a guestbook and a blog for announcements and such.

The last thing I had to do was set up some way to easily create photo galleries. Down the road, I'll have to tie galleries into ordering prints of the actual wedding photos (I've got until August at the earliest to get that part squared away), but before that comes the shower and anything else my sister would want to include photos of on her site.

I already feel sometimes that Movable Type can get a little complicated to deal with for a non-technically savvy person, and that's before you get into trying to hack MT to handle photo galleries. It'll do it, but you've really got to make it bend in ways it's not really well suited for (coming down the road, Project Comet might ease some of this).

So, in my search for another solution, I found Zenphoto, an open-source, PHP-based system for creating albums and galleries based on folders of images.

It's nice, relatively simple to set up (a little more tricky if you're wanting cruft-free URLs), free and easy enough to template with that an afternoon of fiddling got the photos section of my sister's site pretty much squared away.

The Good

As I mentioned earlier, Zenphoto's pretty easy to rip apart and retemplate how you like. There's fledgling template documention in the support forums and just viewing source on the default theme, which is pretty clean looking (if not clean code ... but we'll get to that later) goes a pretty long way to figuring out which blocks of code do what.

The theme-switching is also outrageously easy, and the web-based interface (left) looks like it owes a debt of gratitude to WordPress (which makes sense given the amount of WP integration the developers are promising).

My favorite feature of Zenphoto, however, is the ease with which you can create a new photo album. You can just FTP into the /albums/ folder and creater a new subfolder. The subfolder name becomes the album name and each image name is ... well ... each image name. You can, of course, edit all this later—either through the web interface or on the gallery pages themselves through the wonders of AJAX.

No FTP? No problem thanks to the web-upload interface (left).

It can also co-exist in the same MySQL database as MT with no worries.

All in all, it's a snap to use out of the box and keeps everything pretty simple. There's not a long features list; it's basically just albums, images and comments. It generally does a couple of things pretty well and then gets out of your way.

The Bad

My primary complaints about Zenphoto have to do with pretty high-end worries.

The default theme for Zenphoto is pretty non-semantic (lots and lots of divs and spans ... but bonus points for the unordered list nav). Since this is going to be the basis for most beginners' first forays into creating a new template, it'd be nice to see things be a little more meaningful in there.

My other worry is that some of the output isn't as customizable as I would like. Looking back over the templating documentation, it looks like you can add titles to links, but it certainly looks more difficult than I'd like to be messing with if I could avoid it.

I also haven't messed around too much to see if it can also template different pages—like an RSS feed or a list of recently added photos that could be PHP-included into a blog sidebar—than the three (gallery, album and image) that come in the default template set.

I'm pretty sure it's possible to do this, but it might take a little PHP hackery to get it working.

Overall

Zenphoto's a pretty solid little app for quickly creating image galleries. You can get up and running in under 30 minutes, and completely integrated into an existing website in an afternoon.

It's much, much easier to work with than Coppermine and its ilk (in my experience) because it tries to do orders of magnitude less.

It's not the most powerful thing to happen to photo galleries ... just the easiest I've found to work with.