Gallery open!

[Gryzor]

Hello guys,

The Gallery is now open! I chose to abandon the built-in Mediawiki function which has very limited functionality and install a server-side gallery package. Head over to http://cpcwiki.eu/gallery and test it out!

Cheers
Gryzor

[robcfg]

Excellent work!

As you may have noticed, I uploaded my pictures again to the new gallery and I put a new one of the "mystery chip" under the metal plate 

[Gryzor]

Thanks mate - your contributions are much appreciated

Cheers
Gryzor

[Prodatron]

Hi,

thanx for adding this feature to the CPCWiki.
But somehow I am currently a little bit confused about the purpose of this gallery. So I have several questions:
- what is the advantage of this gallery compared to the Wikis own gallery feature?
- what pictures should be added to the gallery and which should stay in the articles?
- so are there some rules like "please only upload a maximum amount of X pictures to an articel and put the remaining ones in the gallery"?
- what should happen with all the tons of "galleries" (especially manual scans etc.) we already have in the Wiki?

TBH I am not so happy with having an additional gallery system as it splits up the content. It also adds another non-Wiki-feature to this project. You have to surf through two completely different systems to find everything about one topic. The idea of the Wiki was to prevent exactly this.

Why not making sub articles for each album like
http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Article (-> this is the main article)
http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Article/Gallery (-> this is the gallery for this article)
and add the sub article to the category "Gallery"? It would keep it in the usual Wiki format. I think, that the picture and gallery features of MediaWiki are already quite fine.

Well, my personal opinion. If I am wrong we should at least think about linking the gallery in a good way to the related articles.

CU,
Prodatron

[Gryzor]

Hello mate!

Glad to see you here

Your post is interesting in the questions it's raising... let me try and answer to them:

- what is the advantage of this gallery compared to the Wikis own gallery feature?

Well, to put it simply, Mediawiki's gallery features suck. Why, just take a look at this gallery and see all the extra features - comments on the photos, nice gallery styles, easy uploading, everything, really! The mediawiki libray feature is ust an afterthought, just something put together with mediawiki's other features.

- what pictures should be added to the gallery and which should stay in the articles?

Ahhh yes. Well, short answer: whatever you want.

Long answer: this gallery is intended for photos. Not scans, not screenshots, although if someone wants something of the sort, they're welcome to up. Basically this is to replace the Gallery section of the wiki, not the photos in each article!!

- so are there some rules like "please only upload a maximum amount of X pictures to an articel and put the remaining ones in the gallery"?

As above. If you're writing an article on, say, CPCxyz, you're more than welcome to upload a photo, two photos, or however many photos you'd like, into the article. Just use common sense. But if you were going to upload photos to the wiki's Gallery section - then don't, this is the place to be.

- what should happen with all the tons of "galleries" (especially manual scans etc.) we already have in the Wiki?

As said, this gallery is for photos, not for scans. A scan is not part of a 'gallery', unless you want to showcase its physical beauty, in which case it becomes the photo of a document. But essentially a scan is a document, so it doesn't belong to a gallery. For instance: you have a papyrus. If you want to showcase an example of an ancient papyrus, then the scan is a photo. If you want to showcase its content, then the scan is a document itself. Am I making any sense here?

TBH I am not so happy with having an additional gallery system as it splits up the content. It also adds another non-Wiki-feature to this project. You have to surf through two completely different systems to find everything about one topic. The idea of the Wiki was to prevent exactly this.

You're not incorrect in pointing this out. However, the wiki does have its limitations. It's not built to facilitate communication like a forum, and it's not built to accomodate galleries of photos. Indeed you have to go to a sub-system to do your job, but then again this job is now much easier to do and more entertaining...

But I see your point. If others speak up we'll see what happens...

Why not making sub articles for each album like
http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Article (-> this is the main article)
http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Article/Gallery (-> this is the gallery for this article)
and add the sub article to the category "Gallery"? It would keep it in the usual Wiki format. I think, that the picture and gallery features of MediaWiki are already quite fine.

Well, that's the problem, the features are not fine by any means - the gallery tags are just a hack to allow pics to be brought together, but it's very limiting and much more difficult and complex to use, especially for new users...

Well, I'm open to suggestions -let's have them!

Cheers
Gryzor

[kangaroo]

i dont think its very clever to split the wiki in several areas like the wiki itself and an extra gallery. It will bring a lot of problems. Starting with integrity, backups and the problem of managing more than one HUGE system. So be clever and try to integrate more wiki-features to handle better gallery and other media-types

[Gryzor]

Well...

Point taken, and to some extend I agree with you. But the problem is that Mediawiki's capabilities are extremely limited, and in order to do something half-decent one has to know how to 'type-set' it in mediawiki-language... hence my decision to open a dedicated, easy to use integrated gallery.

I think another option would be through some sort of db integration that would fetch images to the wiki itself, but I'm afraid my technical knowledge is severely limited there...

Cheers
Gryzor

[c2r]

It seems that lots of the gallery pages are getting comment spam  \o:   Anyone got any ideas how to stop it from happening?

I used to get a load on my own gallery, and it seemed that it was all added using http 1.0, which we disabled and the problem went away  (for now!)

[Gryzor]

Ah darn. Comments and spammers deleted. Let's see how it goes... thanks for the heads-up!

Luckily, the software offers the option to delete the comments along with users, so it's very easy!

Cheers
Gryzor

[robcfg]

Hey Gryzor, I think I told you earlier, but I cannot see you 664 Motherboard and Z80 clone pictures... Neither with IE or Firefox.

[Gryzor]

Well, the URLs then -and the error it gives?

[robcfg]

Under firefox I get a white screen and under IE I get the classic "Page cannot be shown" error screen.

[Gryzor]

Yeah, saw it myself since. Looks like the server refuses to respond - but only for those two pics? 

I will just reupload them if I still have them...

Cheers
Gryzor