I mentioned in an earlier post that I installed Gallery for managing my photos. Gallery turned out to be a train wreck: the features are nice, but the programming behind it reminds me of 80s style spaghetti code, making it almost impossible to customize. For example, I burned a few hours trying to figure out how to display a random image on a page other than “the random image page” before I concluded it wouldn’t be possible without a massive rewrite. So I dumped it in favor of Coppermine. Here are the photo albums I’ve created so far.

Coppermine allows you to create a custom theme, which consists of a style sheet and a couple of template files (they contain most of the HTML widgets that are used in building the pages). The implementation is hardly perfect though: there is a fair amount of hardcoded HTML inside the PHP functions, so you have to do some detective work if you want to change certain things (e.g. the code it has for embedding video files only works in IE, so I had to track it down and tweak it to support Firefox/Mozilla). Also, it’s filled with a sloppy mish-mash of HTML and XHTML tags, so coaxing it to generate a valid document has required me to touch a lot of code. But those are my only complaints: the features suit my needs and the management interface is nice. A real plus is that you can integrate it with the Windows XP “publish to web” feature, so you can publish images with just a few mouse clicks – no more FTP’ing!

Integrating Coppermine with WordPress has been an adventure. I’m using psnGallery2, which gives you custom WordPress tags and PHP functions for embedding Coppermine photos in WordPress. First I installed the latest stable release, but couldn’t get it working at all. So I installed the current alpha release, and with some hacking, got it to work. I described the problems and my solutions in this WordPress forum post.

I also wanted an easy way to link Coppermine pictures to their related blog entries. I did this by creating a “burl” tag in Coppermine. In the title or description of a photo I can type, for example, [burl=29]some link text[/burl] and it’ll link to WordPress entry number 29. It was easy to do. In bb_decode() – located in include/functions.inc.php – I added:

$text = preg_replace("/\[burl=([0-9]+)\]/", '<a href="/blog/index.php?p=$1">', $text);
$text = str_replace("[/burl]", '</a>', $text);

It’s all set up, so now I just have to slog through all my photos and get them in Coppermine 🙁 . Don’t expect it to happen overnight, but I will try to at least fix all the images that are now broken in my old blog entries as soon as I can 😉 .