Phoca Forum

It seems like I'm the perfect beta tester for Phoca gallery because it takes me all of 5 minutes to bork it up. In the past I mentioned that it needs to be more robust when dealing with images that are bad in some way. I still think this is true. I have a directory of files where a few don't display for one reason or another. Maybe the files are incomplete, corrupt or whatever. I do a multi-add and the page turns blank. No error message or debug output or anything. I can view the gallery from the frontend and three photos have the circle with diagonal line through them so I assume they are the culprits.

The real question is should Phoca catch this condition so a user doesn't have to clean his system to get it to work again?

An even more important question is how do I get it to work right now? I can't view the administrative gallery page at all but I can still view the category page. If there was a problem with a gallery I'd think it would be wise to be able to view the galleries in a list so I could delete the offending one or at least delete the bad photos.

Also I have another question. In Joomla we seem to be afraid of making things simple. We have Content Sections and categories when one or the other probably would have been just fine. With Phoca Gallery we have galleries and categories when I don't know why we make a distinction. If we just had nested galleries like Gallery2 wouldn't it make things simpler to understand and the management interface cleaner?

Although this may have sounded like a rant or complaint it isn't. I'm in awe at the speed that Jan has brought out new releases and I think at the current rate Phoca will become THE Joomla Gallery in no time. There is no doubt in my mind that Phoca is my gallery for the future and I have no problem paying for it (as long as it stays GPL) and I'd like to even contribute code when my workload get's lighter. Great job!

Grant

Well, I figured out how to get my Admin Gallery page back, I used phpMyAdmin to search for the photos that don't show up in the gallery frontend and I deleted them from the database. Now the Admin Gallery backend shows up again...

Not sure if that's a very good long term solution.

Grant

Ok so I'm getting good at using phpMyAdmin to get my gallery to work again but I think I'm going to give it a rest. I've had to rescue it three times now.

What's weird is I renamed a directory of images in images/phocagallery from artsy to Portfolio, and now 9 of them won't show up front the frontend and I get the blank page on the back end.



Grant

Hi, you right, now I am working on error reporting and disabling automatically creating (e.g. in cases, the image cannot be created) and removing some pieces of codes which doesn't report any error message...

Sorry, I don't know gallery2. Phoca is structured as other Joomla! 1.5 basic components: Galleries - Categories...

So please wait, I hope some things will be better with the possibility to stop the automatically thumbnail creating...

Jan

Jan,
In life you have containers and things that go in them. Sometimes the things that go in them are other containers. So it would seem that in a photo gallery we'd have containers and stuff that go in them, eg. a container could hold other containers or photos.

Operating systems work like this too, a folder can have files and folders.

But instead in the Joomla world we have different names for containers - galleries and categories. It seems that a gallery only holds photos and a category only holds other categories or galleries. It seems redundant and a bit strange. Joomla does the same thing with other content items though too. A section has categories but a category can have other categories. I never understood the logic in this.

About Gallery2. All containers are galleries. So you create a gallery and you can put photos in it or other galleries. The container is always has the same name. Maybe I'm missing the point of why Joomla and Phocagallery does this.

Grant

So you have now choice... You need not to use categories view... You only can use category view and folder as categories...