APGM

A Picture Gallery Manager

An Open Source contribution from   Andy Tomalin     

 A Web designer asked me to produce a control that would allow her to create web pages with dynamic picture content - a "Gallery" content manager - something she could drop into her static layout to create a block of images, titles and captions, that could be flowed and paged into the layout, and  later have the content managed by her clients.

 She wanted the browser to be able to click through to full-scale single images, and to have a "portfolio" of very high-quality images that could be previewed in the gallery and then downloaded, used as desktop wallpaper, or printed at user-selected sizes.

 She also wanted a very visual For Sale section, that could generate on-the-fly rollover overlays for images with up-to-date sales information, and click-through to detail galleries and customised feature and specification tables.

 All this had to be "Gallery-Light", without a pile of permissions systems, back-end databases, full-blown content management or stateful session handling, so that the gallery could be deployed fast, preferably on low-cost hosting services, but still secure enough for appropriate high-ticket B2C e-biz.

 I wanted to find an Open Source answer to this. I searched around widely for suitable building blocks or finished controls, but nothing quite fitted the bill described above. The nearest philosophically was Sylvain Pajot's pragmatic and simple SPGM, but I didn't find anything, simple or complicated, that dealt fully with issues that are important to the true layout-embedded gallery and download system I needed.

 Hence, in true Open Source style I have delta'd from SPGM to create APGM, which is about 50% SPGM and 50% new code. The main distinct features of APGM are:

 Designed to flow into columns or any given rectangle, within static pages. Gallery can be single-column, single row, or a full matrix, with controllable picture names, html captions, and size information within each picture cell.  Associated data can be below or to the right of each picture. No frames or iframes are used.

•  Visible gallery contents may be confined to a matrix of thumbnails, or a filmstrip-style matrix plus focus detail picture.
  
•  Layout designer has access to layout matrix and layout cell as HTML "includes", for full control of layout, separated from control code .
  
•  Administrator can set the constrained dimension, control sizes, number of entries per page, cell and and matrix dimensions.
  
•  Free end-user navigation left-right and up-down, from page to page and gallery to gallery, to gallery thumbnails matrices, to detail, to large-scale pictures.
  
•  Galleries can be hierarchical, with click-through from picture to gallery, picture to picture, picture to new layout page, or picture to download selection - all controlled by administrator options.
  
• Control of action on-click picture: none, next picture, new html form, new gallery. New layout pages can contain context-dependent forms data, so a catalogue can be built and maintained by an administrator, simply by editing text and placing it in a server subdirectory beneath the picture gallery. There is no database to install or administer: everything is controlled by the position of pictures within galleries.
  
•  On-the-fly generation, conversion and download of user-selected images and wallpaper at requested size.

Project Status.

 Whilst accepting all the terms of the Open Source licence under which I obtained SPGM I'm not obliged to make my APGM delta generally available. I'm open in principle, but I'd need to do a few things:

 Create a project (Sourceforge or not), a project web page, and a maintainable release that could be freely contributed to.

 Be prepared to provide future support.

 Or show the whole thing to M. Pajot and convince him to integrate my additions into his SPGM stream, which would include, for example, further work to absorb SPGM changes since my delta point, and make it all XML compliant again.

 Find someone else to take the whole thing forward one way or the other.

Any of these requires an amount of work that I don't expect to contribute any day soon. So in the meantime, if you want apgm, send me a message, tell me briefly what your angle might be, and I might share it with you.