A Lick Of Paint

Regular visitors (I’m being a bit optimistic using the plural there) will notice that this site has been smartened up a bit. Here’s what’s changed:

1. Switched to the Tarski WordPress theme. Very easy to do. A bit of customisation was required, but because of the way the theme has been built with hooks in place, I was able to create a plugin to do the things I needed instead of having to modify anything.
2. Dropped the ‘blog.’ from the domain, although all old links should redirect nicely.
3. Integrated a Gallery installation.

The last part was the trickiest, and more importantly the most pointless, so that’s what I’m going to talk about…

Gallery (a.k.a. Gallery2) really is a superbly crafted bit of software. For anyone interested in such things, I’d strongly advise taking it for a test drive just to see the installation, admin, plugin and maintenance interface which I reckon is unrivaled amongst any of the usual PHP web apps. Admittedly I’ve done it many times before, but even so 10 minutes to have it installed and fully configured with a range of plugins is impressive.

What I’ve never done before is integrated it with WordPress, so that took a more than a little bit longer. Setting up the basics was easy enough:

1. Install gallery to a subdirectory
2. Install the WPG2 plugin into WordPress
3. Install the WordpressEmbedded theme into Gallery

This setup gives you integrated user accounts between WordPress and Gallery, an auto-generated Gallery page in WordPress that gives access to the full gallery (see the Gallery link in the navbar at the top), and a few other bells and whistles like the ‘random image’ widget in the sidebar.

The tricky part was getting things to look right. You might argue that I haven’t managed it yet, but it does at least look reasonably tidy, at least in my browser. If it looks gruesome in yours, please let me know. Most of the hassle involved poking around in the CSS with Firebug, scratching my head (CSS guru I am not) and eventually making the necessary changes. There are still quite a lot of things I want to do with the WordpressEmbedded theme to get it the way I want it, but since there is no real point to this in the first place, I’ll probably take my time over it.

The observant amongst you might notice that a lot of the images have Flickr URLs in their metadata. That’s because I initially sucked in all the content from my (soon to be deleted) Flickr account – another dead easy job thanks to Gallery2Flickr. This Gallery plugin actually allows two way bridging between your Gallery instance and Flickr, for multiple users, but I just needed it as a one off.

Anyway, much as I’d like to sit here all night writing a blog post about my blog, there must be more useful things I could be doing…