Hi all,
I find this interesting, at this time when I am just getting back into Gallery deeps again
after several months..
I think perhaps I am one of the "not quite geeks" who find gallery exciting, because it
offers "personalisation" that is not found in a lot of programmes.
It allows us to put our own mark on our work, and as has been mentioned that wonderful
freedom, while also being very careful of security.
Things I have found a bit difficult include :-
** the frequent upgrades - we just get used to one and the next comes out.
That was fine in G1 where I could do them myself, but in G2 they require skills I do not
have. Sure the logical thing is for me to learn MYSQL etc, but to keep fluent in that sort
of thing one must use it regularly -- which I don;t and would not.
I would hope that in future the Gallery can be upgraded from within the Gallery programme -
presumably in the Site Admin section.
** The Reply function of this list annoys in that Hitting reply only sends to the sender of
the message being answered. I often use my webmail, and it does not give me a "Reply All"
feature.
** Difficulties for "Half Baked Geek users" like me.
You'll have noticed that coming back into gallery work, I have difficulty remembering
things I was familiar with before. I think we probably have a large group of users with the
same problem, and yes, they love Gallery and want to be able to revise quickly and get back
to work.
** The documentation is far and away better than it used to be, (many thanks), but it is
still diffiicult to actually FIND the information we need. When someone points me to it,
all I need is there, but I do feel guilty for taking that other person's time.
## I agree with the idea of a main core Gallery with lots of plugins, both official and
3rd party.
That way we can use only those features we want on our site. Also the Upgrades in the core
do not necessarily require changes in the plugins, making the upgrades smaller.
## I'd also like us to have a library of ALL the things that were in 3rd Party User section
as some of the earlier ones were beautifully simple, or just much loved... (It was
interesting to discover that the PG theme is no longer listed anywhere that I could see. It
was not available for a new intallation of the current Gallery, while it works perfectly in
my upgraded galleries. I have yet to discover whether I like Xtreme theme as a substitute
for PG, but I lived with PG theme for so looooong and made real friends with it, and am
reluctant to let it go.)
## I believe any plugin or new feature should have clear, simple, layperson's language
description of what it does and instructions for using it.
I discovered a section in the upgraded G2 the other night, where clicking to select image
frames gives a popup showing samples... wonderful ... we should have that for themes,
colorpacks etc.
# New features (new to Gallery but possibly 'old hat' in 'the industry' should show
examples. The newer versions of PG theme scared me off when they talked of Lightbox ...
which I had no idea what that meant.... and frankly the name does not, to me, describe the
feature.
# Do we have an index of features? giving description and where to find them.(where
creators of new features add their own appropriately)
## Perhaps our themes should each be required to have a "Using this theme" Section (or
call it "About this theme " instructions, or even FAQ). I am sure I still do not know all
the things that can be done with PG for eg.
[[Working on that sort of documentation would interst me, but I work in fits and starts so
could not be the only one]]
Perhaps it all boils down to Security, Simplicity, and Flexibility.
Regards,
Gaynor McCartney
http://www.piopionz.com
http://www.tekuiti-nz.com
http://www.come2see.co.nz - my infant new venture
--- On Sat, 9/8/08, Walid Moghrabi <walid.moghrabi@le...> wrote:
From: Walid Moghrabi <walid.moghrabi@le...>
Subject: Re: [Gallery-devel] The road ahead for Gallery
To: gallery-devel@li...
Received: Saturday, 9 August, 2008, 5:11 AM
Hi everyone,
@Tests or How simple is simple enough?
- Requiring unit tests is a huge barrier.
- Keeping unit tests around, i.e. designing the application for testability, requires some
abstractions (e.g. GalleryPhpVm) which raise the barrier and add bumps to the learning
curve.
- Accepting but not requiring tests will lead to breakage of existing tests and a lot of
maintenance work for the few that declare to keep the tests up to date.
- Dropping unit tests is bad in the long term. Even when the core application is slimmed
down, we'll need test automation for QA.
- Drupal, typo3 and other open source PHP projects have started without test automation and
some of them have added or are adding tests right now and are willing to require tests for
all core code submissions.
I think the key is to keep the core code / the official core project reasonably small.
We don't have to dumb down the code design of the core application. It's sufficient if we
make it a lot simpler than it is now. And there is a lot of potential to make it simpler
without getting rid of useful abstractions and design patterns.
We can then design the core with proper abstractions, designing for testability and still
provide a reasonably simple code base.
The goal would be that you could do pretty much everything with Gallery without having to
modify the code base of the core.
Much more code would live outside of the core application. I guess there could be a list of
officially maintained plugins (not part of the core project) and 3rd party plugins.
For the core project we'd still require tests, for official and 3rd party plugins we'd have
maintainers that have their own authority on how to ensure QA, with or without test
automation.
There are lessons we can learn from typo3 and other projects in putting processes into
place for code and security reviews of non-core code. End users could then decide to only
use 3rd party plugin releases that have been audited for quality and security.
And there are lessons to be learned from projects that have started with usability and
simplicity in mind like Zenphoto. You can start too simple (no internationalization, no
plugin system) and then get into problems when you need to add all the features people are
asking for. We learned some of those lessons with G1 already.
Removing unit tests is certainly a bad idea but as said in other posts, the documentation
is somewhat incomplete or outdated and that's true that it doesn't help new coders to get
into it easily.
So for sure, there is a lot of work to be done on the documentation part.
Concerning unit tests, why not building a "test team" which would be dedicated to the
validation of code from contributors instead of making the unit tests the developper's work
(which is, in my opinion, an heresy) ?
Coders should code ... this is a bad idea to make them test their own stuff because most of
the time, they'll miss bugs simply becuse they don't think like the end user.
@three months:
I think 3 months is unrealistic to implement a lot of drastic changes.
If you had 2-4 full time engineers you could do it in 1-2 months. If you have ~3 engineers
working on and off 5-15h a week on this project and have many other things on their mind,
then you need a lot more time.
Either way, let's talk about the time frame later. Let's first talk about things that we'd
like to change. Let's come up with UI ideas, features that should be in there. And then
let's talk how the UI and those features should be backed by an application / framework. And
then we can talk about how to tackle this, incrementally or not.
G2 is a fairly complex piece of work, 3 month seems utopist for rewriting it but this could
be possible to clean up documentation and rework some important parts such as theming engine
or ACL handling.
@what future do we want to have?
Everything that has been said is very true. G2 is too complex, G2 needs a thriving
developer community to survive and making things simpler is they key to get there.
Say we achieve all that. We release the next generation (NG) version of Gallery. Gallery-NG
is a pleasure to use, it's simpler to hack, easier to maintain, etc.
Where do you see the project in 2 years?
Despite being such a great product, will there still be a market for Gallery?
I find myself recommending Flickr, picasaweb and other photo hosting services to people
that just want to share their images and don't have any technical background. Even with neat
auto installers, even an easy to install web application requires maintenance (upgrades) and
it requires more technical knowledge to create a webhosting account than to create a Flickr
account.
Gallery (1) was once the best and easiest way to share your photos on the web. That was at
a time before there were social networks and photo sharingwebsites.
Things have changed and the target audience for self hosted web applications is much
smaller today. Is it smaller in absolute numbers? I don't know.
And for people who prefer having their own website but don't want to deal with all the
maintenance, there are thin solutions that let you present your Flickr / picasaweb photo
albums on your own website.
So who is still interested in Gallery? What's the audience we want to target this
simplified Gallery application for?
Your mom? No, she'd be a user of a photo hosting service. Well, unless you're the
maintainer of that service, based on Gallery-NG.
It's about people who enjoy freedom. Freedom not to be limited by the design or feature
limitations of a photo service. Freedom to post any kind of photo / video without worrying
that the service cancels your account or deletes your photos without notice.
It's about people who would like to build their own website and may even have fun doing the
occasional upgrades and discovering new features and improvements.
It's about people who host their own (small?) community website. Integration features are
key in this segment. Scalability as well.
Right but I don't completely agree ... to me, Gallery is not a tool to share pictures with
friend (well, it has been done for that at the beginning and is still a very good tool for
that).
Gallery to me is a great and very flexible tool to integrate a media library in an IT
infrastructure.
That's why I chose Gallery (and why we began modifying it) in my last job and that's why I
still choose it now in my new company.
The idea is to build a media library based on G2 with improved media indexation, semantic
search and many other features.
Gallery is great for that task because it has many interfaces for many purposes such as
Gallery Remote protocol, XML-RPC, web frontend, many upload possibilities, open sources,
...
This the niche where Gallery has a chance : beeing the ultimate Open Source socultion for
digital media management.
There are virtually no project of that kind in Open Source or Free Software while there are
a few major commercial products for that purpose (Portfolio, Adobe Lightroom, MS Expression
Media, ...)
Gallery could become a real competitor for those kind of products, especially if we add it
some "never seen before" features such as content indexation based on filters (ROC,
histograms, images signatures, automatic recognition of forms or phonems, .... there are
virtually an infinity of possibilities that could be implemented as plugins).
Anyway, I don't know which road Gallery is going to take but we will definitely move it in
that direction in my company for our usage.
The bulk of the market is using social websites and photo sharing services.
It's a niche. But an important niche.
<sidenote>
As a sidenote, I see G2 as a special purpose CMS, or application specific CMS. It's got
most of the infrastructure to be a step away from a really nice CMS, but it never made that
step. It didn't because it's too complex to attract a larger developer community to thrive a
diversification into other markets.
So this Gallery-NG will probably be farther away from being a CMS. It would be simpler,
even more application specific.
</sidenote>
So, that's what's left of the market after taking social websites and photo sharing
services into account.
What about general purpose content management systems (CMS)?
CMS are growing into Gallery's market as well.
Although we invested quite a lot of effort into designing G2 for integration, we are very
far from doing an excellent job in this regard.
Mostly because integration is too complex. I can take the bulk of the blame for that,
yay!
And Gallery didn't provide the more modern means to integrate (RSS, RESTful APIs, etc.).
When talking about integration, there are basically two markets:
- Integration into mostly static websites, mostly for presentation (displaying an album, or
a slideshow on some website).
- Tight integration with a CMS assuming responsibilities for all matters related to photo
(or even media) management.
As I said ... don't forget professionnals and companies which need a flexible tool when
they have to manipulate huge volume of media data.
As an example, in my former company, we used G2 to manage around 1 TB of pictures and when
I left, we were beginning to have a huge amount of videos too but G2 is, for instance at
least, not designed to manage video media at all.
To me, Gallery is definitely THE tool for companies, professionals or just "super users" to
centralize their media management : one input, many output..
As an example, you could have yoour whole picture library stored in Gallery and then,
connect Gallery to many interfaces : it's own web frontend, a rich client, a blog, another
server dedicated to post management, source for publish softwares in the publication
process, ... you can imagine dozen more usages.
---
LEZARD VISUEL
Walid Moghrabi - Directeur associé
www : http://www.lezard-visuel.com
e-mail : walid.moghrabi@le...
tel : +33 (0) 9 8008 4932
fax : +33 (0) 9 8008 4931
mob : +33 (0) 6 8464 1827
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