Dear all,
after having had a try at Wordpress, Photoshelter and Koken, I am now considering Zenphoto in order to power my photography website, which should both include galleries and posts. But before that, I have a few possibly naive straightforward questions:
- how hard is it to install or maintain? I'm quite IT savvy that's not a problem. But I'm after a gallery and blogging platform, not an internet project that I will be tweaking every week, although customizability is definitely a good thing.
- how does it compare with Koken in terms of speed? I'm giving up on Koken because the pictures are served far too slowly for my taste. Can you comment on this?
- concerning the templates, those I have seen so far seem quite dated and it looks that none of the officially supported templates is responsive. One of the advantages of Koken was it's great looking, responsive templates. Are there similar projects in the air?
- about Zenphoto ecosystem, future prospects. How reliable is 3rd party development? What is the guarantee that a 3rd party template I chose for its features (ex: responsive) will still be around in a year?
- who uses Zenphoto? Are there many professional photography websites out there?
Sorry if I sound rude for my first message but I'm a bit torn: one the one hand the specs sheet of the Zenphoto platform looks VERY enticing but on the other hand the demo page is offline, the message from the team asking members where they see the system going in the future hasn't been answered since it was posted 5 days ago, and I haven't been exactly waowed by the website exemples I have seen. I'd be very grateful if you could dissipate my doubts and help me see the light
Regards
Greg
Zenphoto
Comments
A bit longer:
1. Depends what you consider hard to install or maintain. Installation is quite simple via FTP and updates as well. More info: http://www.zenphoto.org/news/installation-and-upgrading
2. I cannot answer, never used Koken except for a quick test (no surprise ;-)). Zenphoto caches sized images "on the fly"so it might look a bit slow on first generation. More info: http://www.zenphoto.org/news/caching and http://www.zenphoto.org/news/problems-with-albums-and-images
But I do work with WordPress and if I was to made a gallery focussed site I would always choose Zenphoto, even if WordPress improved the gallery part. (Never heard of Photoshelter).
3. Yes, our themes are outdated and we plan provide new responsive themes in the future. Might take a while. But there are some responsive 3rd party themes available that are maintained.
4. As with open source projects there is never any guarantee it will be around for forever. Especially for 3rd party tools that often are made for a specific use at a specific time. There are lots of outdated plugins and themes for WordPress as well but the huge number of them generally makes it look less.
As of Zenphoto itself we have some future plans (as mentioned on a recent article) and already working on them behind the scenes.
5. All known and custom made sites that not use standard themes we know of or made know of are on the showcase gallery. We might have missed some. How good they look is up to the site's or theme creator. You can do any kind of modern theme you could do for WordPress or else, just someone has to do it. A bit do-it-yourself is part of it ;-)
Fact is that we are of course a much smaller (and a niche) project than WordPress (well, only very few CMS are similar big) which also has a sort of commercial company behind it and Koken is free but actually a commercial tool. Zenphoto is run by volunteers only. All I can say we have no intention to disappear anytime soon. At least we made 10 years so far ;-)
I hope that helps and surely you get some more feedback. Here are some articles collected about Zenphoto: http://www.zenphoto.org/news/articles-about-zenphoto
Thanks for your honest answer Acrylian. So if I understand well Zenphoto is undergoing big mutations behind the scene, but with no specific time frame. Jumping in feels like a gamble, but is not altogether impossible as Zenphoto combines features that I need and haven't been able to find in any other platform.
As I understand, the third party "pages" plugin is what turns is into a real cms. Are there any plans to integrate it into the core or, at least, are the developers of this plugin working tightly with Zenphoto team so updates will come together?
Finally, I know there are no specific timeframes but the blog post announcing the big revamp does mention "this year". Can we expect the new look & feel & responsive templates for before January 2016?
It's presence is also the reason why I decided to stick with Zenphoto myself.
When the Gallery project died (http://galleryproject.org/), this is what I settled on.
Strictly speaking, there already is one responsive theme amongst the default themes: zp_mobile. You can design your website using, for example Basic or Zenpage themes for the large screen and zp_mobile for phones and tablets. With a bit of style sheet tweaking, your large-screen site can look very similar to your small-screen site.
Amongst third-party themes, some of the newer ones, including Paradigm (a recent news item) are responsive. I haven't tried Paradigm with Zenphoto 1.4.8.
Theme compatibility: there is a problem, especially with 3rd party themes. I'm not sure if we can assess how compatible themes are. Maybe there should be different icons for 3rd party themes that work with the current version of Zenphoto vs others that worked with Zenphoto 1.4.5 or earlier. But this requires time. Some third-party themes age gracefully, while others can't survive a point-version upgrade without significant work.
If it may help you, I have a website designed from a variant of the Zenpage theme. I did it back when Zenphoto was in version 1.4.3 or 1.4.4 and updated it in version 1.4.5. It still works on Zenphoto 1.4.8 (except for a minor correction I had to do at 1.4.6 or 1.4.7).
What is missing – for some people, not me – is that the administrative interface is not responsive. If you want to load photos and design your gallery (webpages, comments, etc.) with a tablet and especially with a phone, then you'll find the administrative interface a bit ackward to use on those small screens.