Hi Matthew,
please don’t loose the simplicity of the file based approach. My current project is a real estate site. The staff at my client’s company gather up all of the photos of every property and put them into folders, one for each property. then the entire folder tree gets uploaded to the server. You file-system-only design was perfect for that. That was why i picked you gallery. Otherwise i could have gotten Maxi Gallery with all of its bells and whistles. But that was exactly what we didn’t need. There’s definitely a demand for the no-frills solid image gallery without the functionality bloat.
@outre99: Thanks for that. I actually have MiniGallery v0.8.2 on my computer, which with a few further modifications could potentially be released, and might satisfy your needs. In fact, if there is enough demand for it, I could even develop both projects separately.
That said, the new database driven approach may still work for you. The ’sync’ option would take a look at all files in the folder and check against what it knows about in the database, and if there are any new files they would automatically get added, taking details like the name from the files as v0.8.1 does at the moment. It works the other way round too, so during the sync process it also goes through all the items in the database and checks whether the files are still there, and removes them from the database if they’ve been deleted. So in your case, you’d still be able to upload a whole load of photos via FTP, and just click the ’sync’ button to make it all line up again. In theory I could make it do the sync process every time the page was loaded, but I think that’s overkill, hence doing it manually instead. Perhaps in future I could build in a scheduled sync, so that you could still upload just by FTP and the sync would happen automatically every hour or so... Maybe.
Hi matthewdawkins,
I would love to hear about the latest developments with MiniGallery 0.8.2. I absolutely love this gallery but ALL my clients have asked me if there is a sorting option.
Any idea when its expected for release?
At the moment the only way to sort images is to give each file name a number at the beginning, so when they’re sorted alphabetically they’ll come out in the order you want. But that’s not very elegant, not very flexible, and certainly not recommended if you’ve got more than a small handful of photos. The limitations I put in place for 0.8.x do really mean that sorting is almost impossible to do, because it relies solely on the files themselves and no other data. That’s why as I’m developing further I’m putting a database back-end onto version 0.9.x, which will allow for additional information to be stored for each album and image, so we will then be able to store a custom sort order.
I’m working on both 0.8.2 and 0.9.0 at the moment, and I’m hoping to have something to share soon. Sorry I’ve not got it done sooner, work has been pretty busy lately!
On a slight tangent, should the 0.9.x fork still be called MiniGallery? Is the different number enough to show that it’s now got a database behind it? Should I be developing them as separate projects or is clear enough that 0.9.x is the next generation but doesn’t replace 0.8.x?
Hi,
thanks for a quick reply.
I have tried naming the files with numbers like so: 001.jpg, 002.jpg, etc. But for some reason the thumbnails ignore that order and show up in some random arrangement.
I did some reading about readdir funciton and it says that it uses the order in which the filesystem stores the files but i would have thought that it would the be the alphabetic order.
Not sure what to do next.
Well if you need that functionality right now, you might be better off with MaxiGallery. At least until I get MiniGallery 0.9 out the door anyway!
And no, there is no relationship between MiniGallery and MaxiGallery. And no, I didn’t copy the idea. I began working on MiniGallery many years ago before I found the MaxiGallery snippet, and it’s only recently that I thought to integrate it into MODx (it was a standalone gallery before). Just thought I’d clear that up, in case anyone was wondering.
Thanks for the quick reply. I tried sorting them in various orders that included numeric and alpha numeric combinations and they did not work.
I think if you develop 0.8.2 and 0.9.0 as the MiniGallery, people will know what there getting. Just focus on the database or maybe call it MiniGalleryDB.
I look forward to further developments of the MiniGallery as I love the simplicity of it more than the other galleries offered with MODx.
Any idea when we can expect it to be released?
Hello. First of all thanks to Matthew for creating this awesome module, it’s just want I needed.
I’m having some problems with folder permissions though. I set the permissions for the MiniGalleries/images/ folder to 777, but whenever the module creates a new folder for an album it sets permissions to 755 and the module cannot upload images. Is there a way this can be fixed or is it a server setting?
Thanks for your helps, it’s extremely appreciated.
The folder permissions are actually controlled by MODx and not MiniGallery. Got to Tools-Configuration. I think it’s the first tab where you’ll see the default permissions for folders and files.
