Catartis

Gallery2, Planes, Cars and Fish Tales

Mornin' All,

_^..^_ and I were testing Gallery2/Alpha-3 last night. From the looks of what I had seen on their forums, it appeared that it might be worth a try at this point.

Installing was easy. Very close to the same as G1. The main (not clearly noted) difference was that the /setup directory is now called /install. That wasn't hard to spot though. The step-by-step setup is extremely clear.

I haven't diddled with the styles or many of the underpinning yet, but I have to say, it creates some lovely codes. Hit it with the validator, gang. That's what's generated automatically by G2. Yah!

The only visual change I have made so far is to slap a font fish and Tony's name in the corner where the Gallery heading that was nothing more than an ad banner was hiding. That I couldn't stand for more than five seconds. I simply added a same size quickie replacement for the testing page.

There is a nasty little hack in the styles that is said to be for IE5/Mac. It rips at the style validity. I need to go dig around and find where exactly that style sheet links to the pages so I can see how easy it would be to edit the link to nuke codes for IE5/Mac completely. As far as I am concerned, that needs to be sent to the annoyances corner with NN4.x, but the page does need to remain usable. It's day is done, so let's let the sun set on it quickly. Pull those styles to encourage a move, gang!

As it stands now, G2 is very plain jane both out in public view and behind the scenes. The user interface is extremely limited and not very intuitive. But what do you expect from an alpha release?

I know there will probably not be a route to migrate this alpha to the next generation, and it will have to be deleted rather than moved. It is noted that there will probably not be a good upgrade path until the Beta releases. There were also suggestions about saving a duplicate in G1 and importing your data that way. Might be worth a look.

I have attempted to set up so information can be reset at least fairly easily. There is one issue with that though, the upload is the slowest thing I have seen in years! Picture a GeoCities file manager handling a full sized image on dial-up. That's about where it stands. Possible even slower. Ugh!

If I dig around, I think there may be a way to mass upload. If there is not, surely there will be soon. A max of four images at a time or 2MG, whichever is smaller is the pits!

Oh! Did you want to peek? The look is a yawn and since I don't know what captions or titles would be wanted, I have to hold on that, along with the styles since I think *the boys at the office* may be peeking today, so I don't want to be breaking it apart right now. (Yes, dT, this is a time working on Apache locally might be handy. ;^)

Here ya go:

http://tonyb-ict.com/gallery2/main.php

Butzi, the plane you wanted to see is there, so are those Mustangs I never put anywhere. I'm more of a toes in the sand kinda girl than someone who plays with that mechanical stuff.

Images for slide show are sized down to 400x300 since Tony (and most of the guys in his office?) still run on 800x600. Wanted them to be able to see the images in one screen. They can be enlarged to 640x480 or original monster size for details. Humm, that's another thing I wanted to look at... if you change to 640x480 size, is there a way to keep the slideshow running at that size? And max size nukes tall images down to small in that option. Lots of diddling needed, but this is finally a quick gallery that doesn't have codes I am not only humiliated to put on a page, but codes that I absolutely refuse to use. Definitely a beginning in the right direction for the Gallery guys. Three cheers to them from...

... Farron and That _^..^_

P.S. I have some little notes that I will pull together and post over on the Wiki.

Posted by farron at October 7, 2004 08:21 AM