Hi all,
I've finally gotten my new gallery into a state where it can go live.
I haven't quite sorted out the top-level navigation yet so I have a few URLs for you.
The "intro" page: http://www.bluemoon.net.nz/photo.php
Only the "gallery" link on the above page works; it takes you here: http://www.bluemoon.net.nz/photo/printsdb/browse.php
And I haven't linked in the PAW listing yet (my mail program is likely to wrap this):
http://www.bluemoon.net.nz/photo/printsdb/browse.php?mode=PAW
You'll notice that the pictures are almost all the same between the two galleries, because I haven't done much scanning since my last PAW. Actually the PAW gallery is bigger because I've flagged some photos as "not for sale" for various reasons.
In PAW mode you get a different set of comments as well as equipment details. You lot are a slightly more photo-savvy audience so I figured you'd benefit from having more technical info available.
The new PAW listing looks a bit like my old one, only this database is capable of sorting by reverse date so I can split it into several pages without it getting in the way. I feel sad making the old one obsolete but it needed way too much work to give it the functionality I needed.
Techy stuff:
I wrote this from scratch in PHP, using MySQL as the back-end. Most of the work has gone into the back-end management interface so it's easy for me to maintain, although the browse and view scripts themselves are getting quite complicated. The database has several tables for various info, but it's mostly for my convenience - you can't make a spelling mistake with a drop-list. The photos themselves are not stored in the database: they go in the filesystem stored under their code number.
I started this project in January largely as a learning exercise, running in parallel with a small database I'm doing for someone else (who's effectively getting a lot of learning-process time for free). Unfortunately my requirements grew and grew as I saw more and more potential. The to-do list is still a mile long but it's all back-end related and mostly unimportant (darn, I just thought of an important one). I guess that's what software releases are all about - you never really finish a piece of software.
Please let me know if you find any bugs or broken links. It should work in any browser but I can only guarantee Safari and IE 5.5 at this stage.
BTW please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the coloured borders around the bigger photos. I'm strongly considering making them all black. I set up the colours in the database to help choose when mounting/framing, with the help of a little Javascript. So using them on the actual site is an experiment at the moment. I think some of the colours don't work well with the page design though.
Now it's bedtime... I might even do some scanning tomorrow and post a new PAW :)
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
