The Default Theme Carbonized
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Nigel_Aves
Joined: 2005-07-11
Posts: 61 |
Posted: Mon, 2009-09-07 15:37
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Default theme Carbonized - Gallery 3 I've created a Carbonized looking theme based on the "Default Theme". I believe that it will only work if using the latest "experimental code" (that seems very stable). Now, in fairness, I am NOT by any chalk a CSS developer and I probably have not produced the "best" CSS there is but through poking around on Firefox and using the developer bar I think I have it reasonably close. Being a photographer I do prefer to have a darken theme to make the photos stand out.
nivekiam wrote:
First, upgrade to the latest experimental code http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery3:Upgrading (As of Sept6th 2009) (added Sept 20th) - I've tested this with Beta3 and seems to work all OK. So if you would like to give it a spin I've attached a zip file with the theme. Just upload to the themes directory and change the theme in the backend. Please remember I'm NOT a developer and this is for testing only but if you find issues please let me know and I will try and fix. (FloridaDave asked me to post this here).
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Posts: 18451
I have created a skeletal codex page:
http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery3:Themes:default_carbonized
please feel free to add some flesh to it as needed.
Dave
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Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team
Posts: 2
does not work for me unfortunately...
Activating this theme leaves me with a blank screen, and I have to delete it to revert to the default...
It's a pity, I was looking forward to a dark theme too.
Posts: 61
Jayel,
Did you upgrade to the latest experimental version of code?
I believe you need that for this to work, it will not work on virgin Beta2.
Nigel.
Posts: 12544
http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery3:Upgrading
Or wait for B3 to be released, soon
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Posts: 2
You're right, Nigel. Installed the latest experimental version and the theme operates correctly. Thanks.
Looking forward to B3! (I'm new to GalleryX, but loved it at first sight!)
Posts: 12544
Glad G3 is your first experience!
G1 and G2 are fine products, but G3 is much better!
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Posts: 50
Thanks a lot for this - I like it!
Posts: 61
I've tested this with Beta3 - and it's still all hanging together.
If you would like to add a graphics in the top Banner that will appear under all the "other stuff"
Edit the screen.css file found in the theme's CSS folder
add these three lines in #gBanner (on or about line 380)
#gBanner {
background-image: url('../images/my_header.png');
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:center center;
background-col....
To fill the entire banner area use a png or jpg that's 975 X 78 (compress to less that 21k for performance reasons). Now add the graphic to the image folder.
You can of course have lot smaller in physical size and then change the " background-position:center center;" to reposition. Something like :top left; or :center left;
Nigel
Posts: 18451
Nigel,
Thanks for that. I think the best place for things like this is the codex page for the theme. Then people can find it not having to scroll through a bunch of forum post to find.
All users ( you just have to register ) have permissions to edit content on the codex page.
Dave
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Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team
Posts: 12544
Looks like you're not running G3 on your site for the demo anymore.
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Posts: 61
Nivekiam,
Opps forgot to remove the link. (Done)
After the decision to not support "special chars - especially " " and "&" which I have used a lot in naming directories/ photographs (I don't understand this decision at all, every software package I know supports all ASCII chars.) After loading the BETA3 software 3/4 of my gallery was broken. I was testing with a full import from Gallery2 and that was approx 6000 photographs - so it was good stress test.
I tried from scratch, reloaded the software and re-imported from Gallery2 (throwing away hours and hours of work in the process) and the import did some nasty things renaming photos and albums (this was a lot of my photos, part of their name is "b&w", which converted to "band" or "Jane&Mary" to JaneandMary". I also use spaces to separate information, something like "Donna - Denver - Aug.jpg" this converted to something like "Donna_-_Denver_-_Aug.jpg". There where some other funky things as well in naming. I took one look and shrugged my shoulders.
To top it off, I had already worked out a simple method in .htaccess to re-direct from my old gallery 2 to my new gallery 3. Needless to say with all the renaming across the gallery 3 structure this no longer worked at all.
To put it bluntly a right royal mess. There where a couple of other issues as well. Like, why do I have that dreadful login dialogue that never remembers the login! What happened to thumbnail, intermediate and full size. All settings controlled by me and auto-resized.
So I thought I would play with some other software and that is what you stumbled upon!
To end, I do love Gallery2. Never had a problem with it, feature rich, wonderful administration area that's easy to follow and use; importantly has everything you need and some incredibly well designed themes. BUT the key is it does what I need it to do, using the names that I have to use to keep things straight. I just can afford to prepare a set of photographs for my customer and then another set for my gallery.
Posts: 12544
Nigel,
Thank you for the feedback. I'll point the devs this way to read it.
G2 is not going to go away and you can continue to use it. It's just not going to see many, if any, improvements, unless someone takes those reins.
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Posts: 6329
We support special characters in file names, but we don't for the url because it causes too many issues with url parsing. In the url, most apps turn & into something like %26 which doesn't make for a pretty url. The safe url for "Donna - Denver - Aug.jpg" would be "Donna%20-%20Denver%20-%20Aug.jpg" which is almost definitely not what you want. Again we did *not* change the actual album and photo names on disk.. what you're seeing is a separate per-album/photo/movie field
We will implement a gallery2->gallery3 url converter (I need one too for my production cutover) that doesn't require the exact same urls. In fact, the bulk of it is in place since we've got a mapping in a table in gallery3 of all the gallery2 -> gallery3 ids. The .htaccess conversion will be trivial (maybe I'll write it this weekend).
I understand your frustration with a beta product. But I am confident that the decisions we made in Gallery3 are superior to what we had in Gallery2. If you have concrete suggestions about how we can make the internet address field more user friendly, I'm happy to hear them.
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Problems? Check gallery3/var/logs
bugs/feature req's | upgrade to the latest code | use git
Posts: 61
>> read on but as a URL I really don’t care and please don't assume you know what I want
!
I understand that the URLs look funky but if that was a concern of the user (or me) then I would just change my naming convention for files and albums. The only effect that this has is a change in the actual URL itself, the important part of the navigation link always showed up correctly
So, even though the URL looked like this: soft-focus-imagining.com/gallery2/v/fine+art/hidden/fair+ground+1+-+B_amp_W+-+08-04-2006_44.jpg.html
The navigation bar (title under thumbnail) looked like this: Soft Focus Imagining » The Fine Art section. » Private Storage » fair ground 1 - B&W - 08-04-2006_44 and if downloaded the names would be correct.
In gallery2 we had “ “ (space) become “+” in the URL perfectly acceptable and of no concern but the title under the thumbnail was perfect. From what I remember Gallery3 was using this exact same approach until it was changed in Beta3. (I have to be honest after my beta2 gallery destroyed itself with broken links everywhere in galleries and pictures I could no longer trust the software.
The thing is if you honestly believe that the naming and special characters is important then make it an option on the configuration page. Let the user decide what they want, it’s always the best option! In the real world I’m a project manager at a software house acting as the interface between customers and our programmers. Unless there is an absolute valid reason never restrict your customers.
Use conventional naming [ ] Use gallary3 naming [ ] ( will auto-change names to not use “special characters).
The other issue is RSS and Sitemaps (which are basically are the same thing).
Built into Gallery3 is a very simplistic RSS system. I wrote comments about this in the forum but I don’t think they where ever answered.
Assuming that the RSS code didn’t change from Beta2 to Beta3 then the current implementation is actually pretty un-usable. It’s OK for an incredibly simple site but when dealing with a large complex site with multiple galleries in the hierarchy the RSS needs to work at a Gallery level not the last 10 pictures loaded. Basically the same way that a Blog RSS works. I often upload 4 or 5 new galleries in different parts of the hierarchy.
When your looking at a blog on a multi-blog site the RSS feed is for that blog only (or maybe just an article in a blog, you subscribe to the article to keep track of comments etc) Think of a gallery as a blog using photos instead of words! The RSS needs to work at the level you are at.
I wrote a question about sitemaps and was given the answer by floridave, “No plans for the G3 core team to implement a feature like this. It is in G2 - and the community will have to develope one for G3.”
But when you look at RSS and Sitemap both are basically the same XML, the information you need is identical, the only real differences are the “tags” and a sitemap is generated for the entire hierarchy. Wouldn’t it make sense just to support both, as for us, the user both are equally important. <item> becomes <url> / <link> becomes <loc> and <pubDate> becomes <lastmod>
I can not speak for other users but without real RSS support or Sitemaps, even if you have the best gallery in the world you don’t actually have a product I (or probably many others) can use. When Gallery2 came out RSS and Sitemaps were in their infancy. Now they are an integral part of our tool sets.
Typical sitemap
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
>
<url>
<loc>http://soft-focus-imagining.com/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://soft-focus-imagining.com/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2009-09-28T18:23:15+00:00</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
Typical RSS - Feed
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><channel>
<title>Soft Focus Imagining</title>
<link>http://gallery.soft-focus-imagining.com</link>
<description>General photography and Models from up and down The Colorado Front Range (Plus lots of other stuff)</description>
<language>en-US</language>
<lastBuildDate>2009-09-28T11:15:47-06:00</lastBuildDate>
<item>
<title> </title>
<link> http://soft-focus-imagining.com/index.php </link>
<dc:creator>nigel</dc:creator>
<pubDate>2009-09-26T18:51:17-06:00</pubDate>
</item>
And while I’m on a rant !!
Web site optimization. These should be controlled through the configuration so I have the ability to turn them all “off”.
It was good that you concatenated the CSS / JS files for normal use, but what a pain it was to create a dummy working web site to modify the CSS for my carbonized theme (did it all off the server on my PC).
But I would always want optimization as a user option. I’m using a 3rd part optimizer for my web sites that does all the concatenation of CSS and JS / compresses everything including html and has a built in caching system to cut down on backend processing. I can set all my refresh times for the cache and “expires” date depending on file type. (it also optimizes all theme graphics with a choice to have them merged in CSS (my favorite) or build sprites.
Hence the need to turn off all web-site optimization within gallery3 (this is the same sort of mode I use Joomla in). This will be a great option for casual users with simple galleries. But power users will really need this as an option because the chances are they will have their own solution, especially if they are controlling gzipping etc at the server level.
Random images. I can find no way to limit what albums random images can be taken from. Also I can find no way to have different theme settings (or different theme) depending on the hierarchy of gallery. A good example is random images. Used in one part of my gallery2 hierarchy, but not in others. This was controlled by theme.
What happened to photograph sizes? Thumbnail / Intermediate / Full size all user controlled by theme (and therefore you could support different sizes for hierarchy of the gallery) and all automatically generated with the option to throw away the original.
I’ve written enough and sorry to overload you. But you seem to be a voice that has concern and please remember all I want is for Gallery3 that makes sense to swap over too. There are things I just don’t like that I could at a push live with, mainly the back-end and login but there are others I just can not as mentioned.
Nigel.
Posts: 6329
Some thoughts:
1) We're not going to offer endless options like we did in Gallery 2. That overwhelmed most of our users and resulted in general unhappiness. We are forcing ourselves to make decisions to keep the product simple. Gallery 3 will not satisfy all Gallery 2 users, at least not in the v3.0 release. We accept this tradeoff to make a cleaner product.
2) You seem to be confusing the URL with the filename. Currently in Gallery 3, they are totally different. Your file (or album) can be called "Fairground B&W .jpg" and the url can be "Fairground-BW.jpg". They can and should be unrelated although for convenience we derive one from the other when you upload a file. Once separated, it seems to me that the issues you're reporting are no longer a factor.
3) People probably have lots of different needs for RSS feeds. It's easy to write a module to add a new RSS feed. We're swamped just building a base product here so it's unlikely that we'll be able to prioritize building a specialized feed. What we have now satisfies most users we've heard from.
4) I agree that it would be nice to be able to turn off optimization. If you file a ticket for that, I'll work on it.
5) The random image module we provide is simple and will satisfy most users. If you want more sophisticated features then again, please look to the community to write such a beast. Lay out your requirements in a forum topic and see if you can find somebody to take on the task. We've had several community members write modules already and I suspect they can write a version that will make you happy.
6) Photograph sizes. Again, we kept it simple to satisfy most users. Most people are happy with one set of sizes, and it's much easier to keep the code bloat down if we do it that way. This is something that can also be overridden by a community module, if there's sufficient demand.
nivekiam and floridave are just as concerned about this as I am. But please remember that they're dealing with a flood of users every day who are hoping that we'll write the product they need, just for them, for free. We're aiming to make 80% of our users *really happy*. But it's to be expected that the remaining 20% won't be happy with the product right out of the gate. That's why we've built it such that it's easy to add on new modules.
I suggest that you clearly lay out your requirements in separate forum topics and see if you can rally support around them. The more community modules people develop, the greater the chance that v3.0 when it ships will satisfy the broadest set of users.
---
Problems? Check gallery3/var/logs
bugs/feature req's | upgrade to the latest code | use git
Posts: 12544
I remember when G2 was first released, there was a lot of "what about this, what about that" type comments. G2 grew, more modules were added to the core product and more community modules were created to help satisfy the needs of more people. G2 was a beast for most people to customize. G3 is much easier and we've already got a larger number of people in the community writing modules and themes than we had when G2 first shipped. When G2 first shipped there wasn't a single community contributed theme (that I recall) and I doubt there was anything for modules either.
With G3, we've already got 3 themes (thank you Nigel) and a 4th being worked on along with a ton of community modules. Sure, some are rough, but it's a starting point. I'm hoping I can learn enough code and get the time to write a few modules and a theme or two I have in mind. I personally would like to see more advanced settings in G3, but not in the core product. Something that can be turned off or on and enabled by installing an "advanced settings" or "advanced interface" module or something like that. It's a dream, but I doubt I'll ever have the bandwidth to make something like that myself
Your feedback is absolutely priceless. Please, if you get the time and want to help out, follow Bharat's suggestion, create some forum topics about functionality you'd like to see, get people talking about it, possibly getting someone excited enough to write something. I'd also suggest creating new feature request tickets: https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gallery/newticket and added them to the Field of Dreams roadmap, then they won't be forgotten and other people can see them as well if they are searching for feature requests.
btw, I filed a ticked for the optimization toggle
https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gallery/ticket/819
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I have gallery3 and it won't let me upgrade to the latest experimental version of code it states that every thing is upgraded
I extracted the theme in the theme directory but it leaves the screen is black like what jayel posted Do I need beta3 for it to work ? Gene
Posts: 12544
That theme probably hasn't been updated to work with the current code. You can run an older version if you want, but if you run into any problems you'll be asked to upgrade to the latest code.
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Thanks nivekiam, I wished I asked that a few days ago.All in all it was a good lesson.You sure can learn a lot by reading this forum Gene