This is an opportunity to provide some high-level feedback on Zenphoto itself. Rather than thinking of individual features or bugs, I'd love to hear feedback on the more general high-level direction of the project over the next two years. What are the big things that you wish Zenphoto did? What are your major needs that you're looking at other photo services to find?
In any case, just hearing about how you use Zenphoto in a little more detail and how you'd like to use it going forward, would be great. We can't promise any large changes will be integrated soon, but it will help us to inform the direction we're headed.
Thanks!
Zenphoto
Comments
I try to make the first response, hoping for others ones
I wish to have :
- An auto installation and auto update feature (some other projets like piwigo, piwik offer this feature)
- A maintained plugin for a communication with social network (facebook, google+, ...)
- A maintained plugin for Lightroom publications to zenphoto
- A lot of new themes (with all new and responsive standards), highly customizable in admin tabs, without having to change any php lines or css rules
I always think it is sorely lacking a community of themes developers (to create free themes and premium themes also) because it is very important to be adopted by new users (themes are the top of the iceberg of zenphoto core).
Another thing that might be interesting for zenphoto:
implement an offer of hosting (hassle free, ready to use , i.e on a zenphoto.com domain), with a good level of services (scalability, backups, automatic update of core release, plugins, themes ...)
– A theme for the administrative interface.
Keeping it different than the front end has 2 benefits: it doesn't make front-end themes more complex, and it allows one to keep a very different look for behind-the-scene administration. That way, one knows very quickly what one is doing (seeing vs administration).
Administrative themes would fulfil two purposes: add responsivity, and allow one to modify some fields (ex.: if my "Custom data" field is used to explain how to go to the photo location, then I could make its description better so people who upload photos would fill the field correctly.
– A two-level photo processing.
Even cell phones take large photos. And my DSLR takes 24 Mb photos. Ideally, I would love to upload my photos directly – maybe even upload the raw files – so that I find everything in the same place. Zenphoto could then prepare a 1st-level permanent cache with 100%-quality pictures @ 1600 x 1200 px that would be used for all further gallery processing.
If I want to use processed photos elsewhere on my website, the current cache system has one flaw : the cache may be cleared, which means I lose all processed photos and see a blank square on my other pages.
– Easy loading on the road.
I use a DSLR and do not upload photos on the road. But if I were, I don't think I would add extensive descriptions from a cell phone. But for uploads, it might be nice to have a simplified user interface where one would directly go to the Upload page. For example, http://mydomain.com/zenphoto/admin would reach the general administrative page, but http://mydomain.com/zenphoto/load would directly reach the jQuery or elFinder upload page (easier access on the road).
– Revise your position on automated installers.
I haven't checked all of them. Fantastico used to lag, but Softaculous (and another script provider) seems to have replaced it on most ISPs. From what I have seen, Softaculous updates its scripts very quickly – for instance, Zenphoto was upgraded to version 1.4.8 within 2-3 days.
Considering the easy installation and upgrades provided by those automated installers, I think it would help users to keep their versions up to date. A statement on the home page saying that "in many cases, you can install Zenphoto on your website with a 1-click install by going through your website's control panel and checking for Softaculous or another script installer."
@wurzel555: Which plugins are you referring to? Best open tickets which and what is missing. All official ones should support it actually.
Comments form is all in English.
Libratus Theme is in English, some things do come up in other languages but not all of it, plus some of the translations do not fit in the boxes properly.
These are just of the top of my head I would have to go and look if you want a definitive list
contact_form:
All static text is translated and all the fields are all multilingual capable. But since these are content to be changed individually (and stored in the database) and not static text strings they cannot be covered by the Zenphoto translations. This is not how the `gettext`technique works.
comment_form:
All static strings are translated. Comments itself are not multilingual but why should they? I doubt that anyone translates his own comments.
Libratus:
Not an official theme currently and therefore not covered by the main Zenphoto translation anyway. And it is not setup for an individual theme based translation as well which could be done. But is a theme author decision. Best is to open a ticket on the theme's repo on GitHub.
I use it for all my sites - photo galleries or not. I like the idea of an auto update feature as mentioned above. I like that you incorporated the "site closed" feature for maintenance but an auto update feature would be awesome.
It's not hard to update but it's a bit of a tedious process with making sure everything is backed up etc. When you have multiple sites to update it makes the entire process a bit of a pain...I'll admit I've slacked lately on making sure all are updated.
I've used a ton of cms's in the past and they always need modifying...sometimes an update will screw things up - so maybe even something that checks core files for modifications before updating. (a compare option or an option to keep mods etc.)
I know ZENPhoto was originally designed as a photo gallery but I'd love for some shopping cart/payment stuff to be built-in. That would make it absolutely perfect IMO.
Also maybe a bit more options with regards to backend users. I'm working on something now where I need to give someone access to being able to add new users but not everything else. Perhaps a user group option that literally let's you check only the features you want a backend user to be able to access and nothing else.