Zenphoto sorting sorted
Since joining the Zenphoto team I’ve been banging away to add drag and drop sorting. Perhaps the most requested wishlist feature of all! And I’m happy to annouce the first incarnation is now complete. Check it out at my development gallery. You can log in here with admin/password. Go edit -> pier photos -> sort album.
Sweet huh!?
Ok, so the UI and workflow probably need a little polishing, and I really wanna make a fully sortable theme, but the main plumbing is there. This was all made possible by the spectacular scriptaculous library and the excellent SSLists php wrapper. I wrote a ZP wrapper around all that, and hooked it into the admin pages of ZP. After that.. it’s all gravy! The majority of the work came in rearchitecting parts of ZP and how/when they deal with Images, so we could actually sort them at the right time.
Filed under Technology, Zenphoto | Comments (3)Zend IDE Review
In the past when working on PHP I’ve generally just hacked it on my linux box using jEdit. This time around I thought I’d take the Zend IDE for a test drive. First impressions are that it’s pretty useful. I’ve been getting more and more lazy in my development nowadays and like whatever tool I use to offer a set of power features, like the code completion, code folding, hyper browsing, structure views, etc, etc. Zend pretty much has all of them. It also has a decent debugger that allows you to step through the code as you’d expect. What’s really cool is you can connect to a remote server (if you have ZendStudio installed there) and debug from the server. I haven’t figured out how to really take advantage of this yet, but I will.
So what’s the downside? Some of the UI is just well.. clunky. The docking options for windows are a lot more limited than you get in e.g. Eclipse. Perhaps with Zend joining Eclipse the next version will offer more power in that regard. It also seems suspiciously slow in some operations. I know it’s done in Java, but that’s no excuse nowadays. Eclipse and IntelliJ don’t have this problem. The icon set is horrible. Especially the debugging icons. Finally, I’d really like a plugin architecture so the community can add their own bells and whitles. Again, I’m expecting that in the future when Zend ships on the Eclipse platform.
All in all, it’s a useful tool, one that I’ll add to my set. The shortcomings are bearable, and I expect improvements in the future. The UI issues are understandable.. the Zend guys do php, which is server side.. you don’t get server side guys doing good UIs now do you? 
Firefox 1.5 and Wordpress do work
See.. I’m writing this in Firefox 1.5 and things work just fine. Dunno what problem Jason O’Grady’s having, but I don’t see it. Shame, cos the news hit the web like wildfire. Funny thing that.. people are always looking for ways to bash the winners out there. Even if it’s not true.
Filed under Updates | Comments (9)Joined Zenphoto team
I’ve been using Zenphoto for the Family gallery, and really liking it. But it has a few features missing. One of the most often requested being sorting. So I figured I’d better put my money where my mouth is again, and help out. I’ve been invited onto the dev team, so hopefully some of the list of missing features will make it on there soon. I already have rudimentary sorting of the Albums view working, with this hack. More to come soon..
Filed under Technology, Updates, Zenphoto | Comment (0)
