07 Oct 2007 11:30 pm
Posted by Dave under Dave's Thoughts,Geekstuff
Photoblogging
One of my goals for this blog is to see if I can set things up to make it easy to post sets (galleries) of photos. I tried to get Gallery2 up and running because there is a WordPress plugin called WPG2 that allows for “easy” integration with WordPress. Sadly, I never found out if the integration works because Gallery2 wouldn’t even install. It drops its install files outside of the apache document root and if you just copy them over, stuff breaks. So I abandoned that approach.
I am already using a program called webimage which works fairly well, but it is dated and limited ease of use. It is pretty powerful if you spend enough time in the weeds of the php code. I’ve used it for web galleries for www.newpaige.ca as well as for some family photos last Christmas. The trouble with webimage is that it doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the blog and would still require a lot of manual html/php manipulation, which I’d like to avoid.
So what else is there? WordPress recommends yapb in their online docs as “the easiest way to get started with photoblogging on WordPress”. It’s just a simple plugin, no messing around with installs on ubuntu, or configuring another database in mysql (still don’t really know how I got the WordPress database to work!). The only downside that I can see to this is that yapb is not a gallery, it’s philosophy is “One post, one image, one description”, so it doesn’t completely meet my goal of posting photo sets.
There you go – this post is a post with a photo using yapb. The picture is one of me hiking in Steve’s Canyon, near Exshaw, Alberta in September 2006.
Useful links:
Main yapb website and some installation instructions
Alternative Image Formats
Get the main post image in larger sizes:
3 Responses to “Photoblogging”
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Dave on 08 Oct 2007 at 12:09 am #
Once again, something that seems simple just plain isn’t. When posting this entry, the image just would not show up. Several cryptic errors were displayed, some of which related to a permissions problem in the yapb plugin directory. The main symptom was that the image was replaced with a “No GD” icon.
Eventually I discovered that GD is a graphical manipulation component of php and that yapb relies on phpThumb to create thumbnails. Turns out that phpThumb uses imagemagick, if available, otherwise GD1.x or GD2.x. So I did an “apt-get install php5-gd” … and, nothing. Next was “apt-get install imagemagick”, and Bingo! The thumbnail and the image turned up just fine.
Root cause? Probably due to the ubuntu install being a server install with no graphical interface. Why would a server need any stinkin’ graphical manipulation tools??
Dave on 08 Oct 2007 at 12:13 am #
Hmm, a link I opened an hour ago before being distracted by the fact that yapb wasn’t working may be worth looking at; it’s to a tool called myGallery. That might be more what I’m looking for, except that most of the site and all the documentation is in German 🙁
admin on 08 Oct 2007 at 1:21 pm #
I had to add some php code into the single.php in the Theme editor to allow for the alternative image formats to be displayed. The pertinent lines are:
< ?php if (yapb_is_photoblog_post()): ?>
Alternative Image Formats
< ?php yapb_alternative_image_formats(array(1600, 1024, 800, 640, 320)) ?>
< ?php endif ?>
These template functions are native to yapb see: http://johannes.jarolim.com/blog/wordpress/yet-another-photoblog/yapb-template-functions/