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    • image galleries populated by URLs from other servers

    Posted by kirez

    I want to enable all the users of my site to create galleries of images hosted on other servers, for example their Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa accounts.

    I'd like to go further and be able to display my entire Picasa gallery / account in my wiki.

    How are tiki users doing this? Unless you have state-of-the-art modules for mass uploading images, it's far more efficient to let Picasa /Flickr etc do its thing and display galleries by importing the URLs from Picasa/Flickr/etc.

    Also, I don't want to use space on my server hosting images. Far more efficient to populate the database with URLs than with images.

    Reads: 1603
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee

    I haven't seen or heard about any elaborate method to use Tikiwiki as a kind of front end for offsite galleries. I suppose Tiki's galleries wouldn't be used at all in this scenario. An iframe could probably also be used. I did something similar with a Menalto Gallery in an iframe in a Tiki wiki page, which worked pretty well. Would a wiki page with links to the images work? Since we have shadowbox, a gallery made of one or more wiki pages could be pretty nice. (See http://zukakakina.com/Shadowbox_galleryQuestion for an idea of syntax, etc.) Of course it isn't exactly dynamic; every image needs its own url. Images could probably be fetched dynamically, but I guess this would require a new wiki plugin.

    -- Gary


    Posted by clicc
    I think you'll have to hack it in w/ a plugin or a custom php page. Fundamentally, what you're asking has nothing to do with existing tikiwiki features - I don't think there's currently an easy way to do it otherwise.

    Posted by kirez

    I'm not looking at the module right now, and haven't for a few days, but --

    building a gallery simply involves uploading the images. The database then uses the location of those images, the URLs, to display the images.

    The problem is, the current module is hiding the database info from us. It's doing this because the code assumes that we're using the tikiwiki database. That's a stupid assumption. Why on earth wouldn't I want to pull images from elsewhere?

    All we have to do is allow us to specify the URL of an image to add it to the database. Done deal. It's actually a lot simpler than the current approach.

    Simple image gallery: add the URL for the image. Bells and whistles: specify number of rows and columns, specify heights and widths, specify default thumbnail size.

    Complicated image gallery: build a database by uploading images, behind the scenes (like some micro$t app) the database will assign and manipulate URLs for these images as if we're too stupid to be bothered with such technicalities (I'm sure they're in the correct, logical place and of course it's easy to find). Bells and whistles: etc etc.


    I don't mean to be hostile at all. I love tikiwiki and all the doc, support and super community you have for it. I tend to be harsh with my words just because I'm thick-skinned myself and even more brutal criticizing myself. I'm also pretty incompetent at all tasks on a computer, so there's a reasonable chance I'm completely wrong in my perspective here.

    But I don't think so. The image gallery does work by populating a database with images, and it does use the URLs of those images to manage and display the data. So why not just let us input the URL? Then the trick is done.


    Posted by kirez
    Gary, I love the shadowbox gallery you've done on Zukakina, that's awesome! I definitely want to use that.
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee

    Heh, thanks but credit goes to luci; he did the initial shadowbox implementation for Tikiwiki. For Tiki 3, shadowbox switches from mootools to jquery, which is also available for other ui effects and functionalities. Notice how menus and modules work at http://zukakakina.com/tw3/Question, if you like (but it's 3.0beta, so there are glitches - for instance, at the current revision it seems like a page reload is necessary before the effects show up, and theme transitions aren't complete for not-logged-in users).

    Another thing, before long the current image galleries will be phased out as file galleries become all-purpose (maybe by Tiki 4 release). So maybe the idea of gallery-of-hot-links could be added. You could file a feature request at dev.tikiwiki.org; this is probably a good time for requests related to galleries since they're in flux.

    -- Gary