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Thumblist2 version page: Thumblist2.CreepingFeaturism?

CreepingFeaturism

Thank you all for your ideas and suggestions on how to improve the thumblist recipe, that I received here or by e-mail. I am considering every one for inclusion.

However, my intention was (and still is) to write an easy, fast and simple script that lists attached images, without complicating things. Consider it an extension of the (:attachlist:) directive. More features means more code, more server load, more bugs, more documentation to write, more user support (because it is too complicated and difficult). Sometimes less is more. See the article Creeping featurism, our script is now much more complex than I intended. From 8 kB, the script is now more than 11!

Some of the proposed features require opening external pages to extract variables or comments. This can be really slow on a shared hosting, because PmWiki has to check Group and page permissions and read the external page for every thumbnail -- if you have 40-50 per page, this may even not work (Supercache cannot help because it will never be up-to-date).

Note that with the "Image templates" you can include other pages, or extract variables, or set a comments feature, for the currently displayed picture, using the variables {$UpFilePage}, {$UpDir}, etc. There are fine recipes that can do this. You can have very flexible configurations, just need to plan them well (then post them here to help others).

About extracting metadata from the pictures, or worse, modifying it, currently much of these things are not really stable and interoperable: the usable scripts able to do this are almost 1 megabyte of code, or require PHP 5.1. Besides, extracting metadata will make things slower. One can implement a recipe that will try to read such metadata on one individual image at a time, but it will be a different script. It can then collaborate with ThumbList, for example in an Image template.

Also note that there are other fine gallery scripts that can do titles, captions, individual comments, pagelists, categorisations, unlimited subdirectories and more, you can give them a try. You can also take the thumblist script and add some functions, and then you can support a "ThumbListPro" with all other features.

To resume: our script should be working, easy, simple and fast, but talk to me, because I am considering all propositions. If your nice idea can be done simply and easily, I will add it.

Thanks, and a Happy New Year! (Already said that, but) Wishing you for 2007 to take lots of nice pictures and to display them in many nice galleries! --Petko January 02, 2007, at 05:32 PM