After my less-than-good experience with other gallery packages, I decided to try Zenphoto. It installed easily from Cpanel. The options for this thing are wonderful. Very well organized. However, I'm still going through some online help to make sure I have the gist of the package. There are so many options, it's easy to make a mistake.
The website is zenphoto.org. Looks like Zenphoto is based on jquery javascript framework. Documentation seems to be located all over this site. They explain installation, file structure of the package, and update structure. There are notable tutorials on privacy,theming, images and galleries, plugins, and integrating with other sites.
The plugins pages are exceptionally well organized. You may not know exactly what each one does, but there are info links for each. They are also grouped by category. It has a plugin to handle serving random file types. All of the other packages I've tried up until now have been completely rigid in their ability to just serve the stupid file. This is great. Maybe other packages can do the obvious, but Zenphoto put the option where I could find it. Other valuable options include putting icons over the images to indicate their status (published/unpublished), various social & comment options which I am not going to use for now, running a website based on Zenphoto, comment forms with reasonable security options, the themes page actually works and has working links to other themes you can install. For my purposes, I'm going with the Libratus theme (third party: https://github.com/gjr-osweb/libratus).
There are quite a few advanced features that could really use a better explanation and overview (CMS plugin, colorbox, etc). However, it seems this is a good package so far. Still not sure if the file upload size issue is solved. I'll post any important updates on that in the replies.
Review of Zenphoto
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- Site Admin
- Posts in topic: 2
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Sun Apr 28, 2019 3:48 pm
Review of Zenphoto
word count: 319
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- Site Admin
- Posts in topic: 2
- Posts: 14
- Joined: Sun Apr 28, 2019 3:48 pm
Re: Review of Zenphoto
Unfortunately, Zenphoto has decided to be rather opaque with how settings are to be done. The prime example is that I can't change the background color on their base theme, said theme claims to be responsive but isn't, and their nicest looking theme, Libratus, doesn't bloody work. Just fails. Others have complained, but the author has moved on. And so shall I.
I'm giving the Zenphoto a thumbs down. So far, there isn't a decent working, free photo gallery software package available. It's easier and probably better to customize static pages.
I'm giving the Zenphoto a thumbs down. So far, there isn't a decent working, free photo gallery software package available. It's easier and probably better to customize static pages.
word count: 97
Last bumped by jake-boards on Sun Jun 16, 2019 9:55 pm.