Aug 24

Gallery

Personal

As an exercise in pain, I got Photon working in Wordpress 1.2 just like Johaan but all by myself this time without his help (He graciously helped me get Ecto working correctly with WP). Of course without his patch to the wordpress 1.2 xmlrpc file, it would have been in vain. Supposedly wordpress 1.3 will have an xmlrpc file that actually works correctly. I guess we’ll see.

You can see the VERY preliminary result here. Now as it stands, Photon places the data in the wrong fields for Wordpress, which most likely means that wordpress is not conforming to the MT API with their xmlrpc. Perhaps Johann could patch that as well?

I will need to do some heavy hacking to the index.php file from wordpress to make it bend to a gallery format that looks something like this, but this will eventually become the part of the site where I will be selling prints officially. I need to deal with the lame way that WP deals with the whole body/excerpt/summary issues so that the thumbnail is no longer included in the body when you click on it. Should be a lot of fun. I’ll probably write it all up once I get it all going. Or maybe I won’t kill myself and I’ll just use Pictorialis.

I’m going to use paypal in the short term for payments as they make it ridiculously easy to include their shopping cart on your page and make purchases. Someday I will get around to coding my own billing/accounting/shopping cart thing. But that day is not today, or in my immediate future.

Photon is a cool little iphoto plug in, but it is sorely in need of some features. Here’s the list:

  1. Real error reporting.
  2. Auto Scaling of Width and Height when the other is changed.
  3. Templating, so I can tell it what field the thumb goes in, main image, text, etc.

That’s all I can think of at the moment.


3 comments so far...

  • Jonathan Younger Said on August 24th, 2004 at 11:51 pm:

    Thanks for trying out Photon.

    1) What would you like to see for error reporting? We’re pretty limited by iPhoto on what we can and can’t do when handling errors but welcome any suggestions for making this better.

    2) We had auto scaling of Width and Height but removed it as some people might want to enter only the Width or only the Height and auto scaling would prevent that. Perhaps we’ll look into making it an option to use auto scaling.

    3) The Entry Creation tab of the Account Settings allows you to specify all of these things. Is this not sufficient ?

  • Joe Said on August 24th, 2004 at 11:59 pm:

    Jonathan: Thanks for responding. Damn that was quick.

    1. a little drawer would be great just showing the full error kind of like ecto does. Or a sheet. I kept getting 803 errors and had no idea what was causing them. For some reason, the server wasn’t catching them in the error log. I had to just shoot at things in the dark. I eventually had to use ecto to track down the issue.

    2. Since this feature looks like the webpage tab, I guess I expect it to function like that tab as well. A checkbox in the image upload settings would be cool here.

    3. Look at me I’m stupid. I did not even see the entry creation tab. Doh. Yeah this is great. Thanks. The only other thing I would like to see is the comments field in iphoto appended to the body.

  • Jonathan Younger Said on August 25th, 2004 at 12:18 am:

    1. We’ll see what we can do about displaying the full error somehow. Your particular error happend during the actual export and we’ve found iPhoto to be pretty picky about handling errors during exports. Right now we log the full error message to the console in addition to displaying the error code returned from the server in the export sheet.

    2. I was thinking the checkbox as well.

    3. No problem. We’ve had a few comments on more flexibility with field options. There are an infinite number of ways people want their photoblogs configured and providing an easy way to do this is quite the challenge :)