How do you get a basic Gallery system to function???

Well I explained that poorly. I’ll try to work up an example for you when I get home from work tonight. But your point still stands in that getting it to work right out of the box takes a bit of playing, it isn’t very cut-and-dry. There is a tutorial or two on running it with Gallerific, but nothing on a straight-forward no-frills install. Everyone seems to use it with some sort of plugin, which is great, but doesn’t help you out. Sorry I can’t help on the no-plugin side. Although, what I did would work without floatbox, but it still requires a non-default tpl. Not knowing precisely how Gallery works, I’m afraid, is my problem here, I’m sure there is a simpler way.

Thanks!

A while back there was a user who documented his success with using Revo, Gallery and two or three jquery scripts (thus avoiding MODx produced pagination). While this seemed like it took some heavy lifting it seemed to work for him and appeared well documented, so I will try track it down.

Carefully explained documentation is my "Holy Grail" when it comes to anything MODx...

Max

OK, I am totally psyched! I finally have a Revo Gallery system that works!

I found this guide here: http://modxrules.com/articles/modx-revolution-gallery-with-colorbox-and-jquery-asynchronous-image-loader-jail

This MODx user combined Revo, If, Gallery, Colorbox, jquery, and JAIL to make it all happen. He has included a sample template, the three required chunks (now freshly updated) and a good explanation to making it all work. Fantastic!

I then went in and customized the height and width settings for the generated thumbnails. I now have neat looking 80 pixel square thumbs that do a great job of representing the full size images. I can now mess around with this template and build my own layout and CSS etc. That I know how to do.

I know I was asking/seeking to get a basic system of Gallery working. Obviously this option has way more moving parts, but seeing how I got it working I will take it! It would still be great to see some more detailed documentation and tutorials on Gallery though.

Next up: GetResources and blogging!

Cheers,

Max

In order to try to get a basic call to "Gallery" working, I did the following (btw, these are just from notes to myself so I could back track if needed. They weren’t intended as a tutorial). Note that there is no styling, js, or anything. So all you see are the thumbnails. But it at least told me tht things seemed to be working... Hope it helps.
Matt

- in the manager, select System->Package Management from the menu at the top
- select "Add New Package" in the resulting dialog box
- select a provider, selecting modxcms.com
- in the search box, type "gallery" (note that the popularity list isn’t getting updated, btw)
- select "download" and "finish"
- select "install" in resulting list of packages
- agree to the license, select "next" and "next" again at the changelog screen
- at the console output box select ok, but note if there were problems
- resulting package list should show gallery as installed
- refresh the manager and select gallery from the "Components" menu
- select "create album". give it a name and make it active
- right-click on the album name and select "update"
- upload images
- select "save" when done
- go to document where you want to place the Gallery call and put
[[!Gallery? &album=`gallery_name_from_above`]]

I don’t do a lot of photo album stuff, but I always thought MaxiGallery was a great add-on. It’s relatively simple to install, easy to use - even for non-techie users, and works with a variety of image presentation packages. The drop-shadow, image-mask, and other image features are also nice. It will also easily show a single image with previous/next links to the rest of that image’s gallery. The real plus is that once it’s installed, users can do a nice job of managing a gallery completely in the front end.

I’ve thought about doing a relatively straight port of it to Revolution. I’m sure it’s doable, but because it developed long ago and over time, the code is not very modular or OOP-friendly. Someday, when I have a month or two with nothing to do, I’ll try to bring it over.

The tutorial listed above is great. My only suggestion would be to convert the image height and width into placeholders.

Most of the gallery add-ons for MODx are primarily for uploading and organizing the images. For output, they virtually all allow customization of the HTML output of the image tags using tpls, usually in chunks. You can use any Javascript gallery script you please, customizing these chunk tpls to generate the HTML needed by the Javascript. Then it’s just a matter of working with the Javascript and CSS to get it looking and behaving as required.

I’ve used Jot, Wayfinder and Ditto for customized gallery management. Custom TVs provide another interesting means of handling gallery image input. Even regular TVs with @DIRECTORY binding and a custom snippet to process the TV’s content can be used. It’s all centered around producing the HTML output that the Javascript needs.

Quote from: sottwell at Feb 18, 2011, 08:20 AM

Most of the gallery add-ons for MODx are primarily for uploading and organizing the images. For output, they virtually all allow customization of the HTML output of the image tags using tpls, usually in chunks. You can use any Javascript gallery script you please, customizing these chunk tpls to generate the HTML needed by the Javascript. Then it’s just a matter of working with the Javascript and CSS to get it looking and behaving as required.

I’ve used Jot, Wayfinder and Ditto for customized gallery management. Custom TVs provide another interesting means of handling gallery image input. Even regular TVs with @DIRECTORY binding and a custom snippet to process the TV’s content can be used. It’s all centered around producing the HTML output that the Javascript needs.

Right, though in MaxiGallery, the drop-shadow, image-mask, resizing, thumb creation, watermark, etc. stuff is done during the upload, which would mean faster loads than having some other code doing it on the fly.

I know a lot of people love MaxiGallery. It has that interesting method of using the front end to upload, label, caption and sort images. So long as all is set up correctly and you get that all important "Manage Pictures" button you are good to go. MaxiGallery can be left as is or tweaked in a zillion different ways. I like adding the FancyBox jquery myself.

But the nice thing abut MaxiGallery is that a user can install it and add the simplest snippet call and MaxiGallery will actually work. Its a nice place to start from. I have this sneaky feeling that the Revo Gallery was not built to perform in this way. I struggled just to present thumbnails and could never get the full images to appear in my quest to use Gallery in its basic configuration. However the combo Gallery, If, Colorbox, and Jail method works very nicely I must say.

Bob, I bet a lot of users would love to see a refreshed MaxiGallery ported over for Revo. The other tool users would like is a packaged system that includes an image upload system, sorter and a jquery slider carousel system, much like EvoGallery presents. I really like EvoGallery for this kind of task. EvoGallery has an interesting installation method. It is also excellently documented. I know the core guys are still fine tuning EvoGallery for server performance etc, but I have installed, activated and used it with no issues. Did I mention that I liked the documentation?