I have been working on a side project to customize a zenphoto theme for a friend's client. Her client had recently wanted to be able to upload their own content to the site with out constantly having to rely on a web person to code the new content. She had somehow come across Zenphoto Gallery open source CMS and upon a rather quick install and an hour or so of tinkering with the back end controls I realize the pretty darn nice back end API Zenphoto had working and well documented. Her client, however, wanted a customization of the site to somehow generate thumbnails each representing a whole "sub-album" of images rather than the default set up in which the thumbnails were representing a selection of an individual image. The whole idea was that he had categories of photos and in each categories the photos were organized into photo-shoots of the same theme. We found a theme that was not part of the base install of Zenphoto which incorporated a J-Query gallery and looked a lot like his current site but still did not have the functionality the client required.
Well, it's been a couple of weeks and with little reading and and hour or so every evening the customizations are nearly done. The actual work was very easy since the frame work had a method for every stored element of the gallery. For once I didn't have to write my own DB pulls and I am pretty confident that any change in content will not have me pulling my hair out at an unexpected theme fail. Zenphoto gallery comes with a robust but no BS backend that anyone can learn to use in a couple of hours and the most minimal server side setup I have seen. I literally copied the package to the web server and navigated to the URL. It auto detects a first time navigation and pops up a form to fill out some DB info. For any one interested in installing a photo gallery on their own web space check them out at:
Zenphoto info site ---> http://www.zenphoto.org/
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