After testing a couple online album candidates, I settled on ZenPhoto for its simplicity and the somewhat WordPress-like styling.
Originally the intention to change app is so I am using a more actively maintained app. Phpalbum is great, but from my observation, it’s very rarely updated. So I wanted to look into other alternatives, and easily, Gallery comes to mind because of its popularity and the devs are constantly improving on it. At the time of this writing, their next-generation Gallery 3.0 is still in the work. Not being a patient person, I finally gave in and grabbed G2 and tried it out. After a quick setup, I realized that a very big difference between Phpalbum and others is that Phpalbum has albums and pictures separated by default. Phpalbum’s default theme organizes albums statically on the left side of the browser, so visitors can easily jump around albums without hopping back and forth between levels.
Not so easy in the case of Gallery and other apps I have tried.
By default, Gallery organizes albums and pictures together. If you click into an album, you are given the view of that album’s content, nothing else (unless you have the albumSelect module installed). To jump to other albums you have, you have to backtrack to the previous level, and go from there. This way of navigation, in comparison to phpAlbum’s default navigation, is way more complicated and unnecessary. Mind you, even with albumSelect, there are downsides: for one, link text is too small, not very human friendly; secondly, only 1st level links are immediately visible, so if you have multiple nested albums, then you are out of luck. Gallery is still a great and popular product, but turns out it’s just not for me.
So I turned to more researching. Luckily, eventually I stumbled upon a list comparing quite a few online album apps at Wikipedia. That’s when I notice ZenPhoto.
Long story short, ZenPhoto has the same navigation problem as Gallery is great, and the navigation menu problem is solved with the plugin print_album_menu that Acrylian (the dev) wrote and included with the package, and I am now using it with some tweaking on the GUI side. As a new user, thank you, ZenPhoto devs.
Now, enjoy the new album!
Thanks for choosing Zenphoto but I am quite curious what the navigation problem actually is. I see no big difference to phpalbum… Feel free to discuss that on our forum.
Now that you mentioned, it’s actually the print_album_menu.php that you already developed that I missed. I believe it’ll do what I was aiming for. Thanks!