Is Zenphoto dead?

DarrellD

I'm just wondering what the status of ZenPhoto is like. I understand that RL gets in the way of the things that we like to do, but as was stated in Trisweb's personal blog:

And for those of you only reading for the Zenphoto tidbits, I’m going away for a month so I won’t be touching it until August.

It's been three months since August and there's been no updates on/to ZenPhoto (not even since June when 1.0.3 was first released).

I know it's been mentioned before about how Trisweb would like to keep the developers to a "small team" and that he'd like to be able to "control where [ZenPhoto] is going". But as of right now, it just seems as if ZenPhoto is going to the graveyard as there are not more updates.

Chilifrei64

GameDudeX,
I feel your pain. I have been waiting around the forums here hoping to see more activity. There were a couple updates but nothing significant. I would really hate to see this project die. It is the most promising photo gallery out there. Hopefully trisweb will get some time or open it up a little for others to contribute.
I have been waiting for subalbums for quite some time now and finally just gave up on it and still moved my entire gallery to Zenphoto in hopes that it will still become.. However I am not seeing it happening too soon.

aitf311

I hear you guys. I wish this could be handed off to someone interested. People have invested many hours to getting this to work as their family and/or photography sites and its just a shame that we will have to switch again.

dprior

Well, it is open source, right? I have a few ideas for features I need, and I think I'll just attempt to add them myself over the winter. If progress here is still dead, then we'll have to see about creating a new project.

It's a shame because things moved so quickly at first. I can empathize with the loss of interest once you take a project public, but ZP is just missing a tiny bit of spit and polish to make it a true, non-beta, 1.0 release.

I am so disheartened by the lack of activity on the ZP front that I installed Gallery yesterday! Don't worry - I quickly removed it. The only other comprable project I can find is PhotoStack which seems to be suffering from the same stalled fate...

There's no evidence that ZenPhoto, as an ongoing development project, is at all Alive.

aitf311

I wish I had some PHP background so I could help out. Hopefully others can take this and run with it. There actually was a guy not long ago who did this but his project ended up being bloated (even though he implemented sub albums http://blog.dukechina.org/gxp/)

trisweb

Well, obviously I have to reply to this...

Basically, I just have to get to work. Sorry for giving up thus far, but it's hard, you know. I'm not going to give any excuses or anything, I just need to get to work.

Here goes [starts up jEdit]. Stick with me guys, I promise I'll jump start this thing...

So as long as I have your attention, tell me if I have this list of priorities at least mostly correct:

1) Subalbums
2) EXIF
3) Search
4) basic spam protection, all other "duh" things that should be there already...

I think a zenphoto with those things would be a good gallery, no?

Let me know what's making you so impatient and I'll try to alleviate it (excuse the vocab, I just took the GRE today ;-). One of the reasons I let it slide so far is because I thought it was a pretty stable, useful release that served its purpose fairly well. There's definitely work to be done though, so I'll get started. :-)

Stephane

Here's my list of priorities:

1/ TAGS! (and subalbums...)
2/ RSS feeds
3/ EXIF
4/ Search
5/ Plugins

I would love to see some active development but I hope it stays in the hands of just a couple people. ZP is beautifully simple and needs to evolve cleanly to preserve that.

scarfication

sub albums would make me a very happy man
my gallery is offline since june because im waiting for the subalbums.. and no other photo script does the job as zenphoto does

thnx for all your effort tris!

lordcoffee

What I would like to see is an option to rotate the images in the admin panel like photostack does. Zenphoto is the best galleryscript I've ever seen!!!

trisweb

Sounds reasonable everyone.

I've been successful tonight at implementing the core code behind subalbums nearly completely, all that remains is to convert the sorting and administration code to a new interface for subalbums.

@Stephane - Tags would definitely be great, but for those I would like to wait for a 2.0 version (I know that seems unlikely from me, but trust me, I have ideas). Subalbums first, with your 2/3/4 items soon to follow. Plugins also for 2.0 I think.

@scarfication - Subalbums coming, as I've said.

@lordcoffee - Definitely a needed feature, and something I can do for the next release. I have an old camera and have often needed it myself... (you know you need have work to do when you're cursing your own software!)

I'm calling it a night, but overall it's been a good one. The latest changes from the non-subalbums trunk have been merged into the subalbums branch and are working beautifully (major performance improvements included). I have a simple theme working with sub-album parent/child navigation, but I still have much to do.

The new repository, btw, if you want to keep track of my progress, is here:

http://www.dh.trisweb.com/zenphoto

Yes, it's moved AGAIN. The previous move wasn't so hot, so I dumped it and stuck it on dreamhost (I'll keep backups, don't worry). Btw, dh.trisweb.com and www.trisweb.com are different hosts :-] Mmmm... the beauty of DNS.

Chilifrei64

Trisweb,
Thank you so much for showing back up here and helping all of us out. I think I speak for all of us when I say we all really appreciate all your hard work, any work that you do on this. This is far and away the best gallery software out there. Seeing this gives me hope that this project will stay alive and I can help keep my interest in this project.

KEEP THE DRIVE ALIVE!!!.. WOOO!!!!

DarrellD

Tristan,
You're the one that I was really hoping to get a response from and so I'm glad to hear you working on it again. Personally, I would rather not see ZenPhoto go to some other development team or whatever. This is *your* baby and I think you have many good ideas for where you want this to go. My main purpose for starting this thread was just to "get the ball going" and see where things were at.

As far as the current version being "stable" -- I believe this to be a true statement, the only thing is that it's been a while since there's been an update to ZenPhoto as a whole within the past 5 months. I believe that on thing that keeps a "community" or even project such as ZenPhoto going, is the fact that the people who support the project knows that the project is still being improved upon.

Lastly, as Chilifrei64 stated, I *am* indeed grateful for all the hard work that's been put into ZenPhoto thus far and I would love to continue to see it grow to it's full potential. This *IS* by far the best gallery software out there and with all of the plans that you have for it, I would not be surprised if many other Gallery and Gallery2 users switch to ZenPhoto.

Thanks again.

cwconsulting

I may have a way to save this project. I run a web development company and I think supporting great open source projects is pretty crucial. I have a personal connection to this particular project. If anyone is interested in hearing more, please email me chris[@]chriswinnconsulting.com -- or visit my web site www.chriswinnconsulting.com

trisweb

@Chilifrei64 - Thanks! I'll do my best!

@GameDudeX - I wouldn't let it go to "some other development team" unless I knew they would keep the same strategies and philosophies, but that is something I would of course consider if I were ever unable to work on it anymore. We're not there yet, no worries

About it being a while since an update, I agree, it can be frustrating. That same stagnation in Photostack is why I built zenphoto in the first place. Forward movement is important for a project to keep everyone interested, and heck, to keep it fun and exciting. I'll try to get back on it. Thanks again for your compliments

@cwconsulting - you'll be hearing from me very soon. :-)

carasmo

This is the best gallery, photo software! I've installed nearly everything and this one is Zen like in it's implementation and logic.

Very sweet.

I've made a donation and hope that others follow suit so this beautiful software keeps on getting developed.

There's only a few missing things, for my use anyway:

Comment moderation
Word filtering for naughty words
RSS feed (but I made my own so I'll post it).

That's all I can think of.

Oh yeah:

A class field so that an image tag can have a certain class or id to put in the reflection thingy, I had to open up the functions and add it there, easy enough, but it would be cool to add the classes in the config file.

Thanks!!!!!!

La0c00n

I just wanted to say: I'm actually a student in computer Science, i have free time and actually not working on any web project...

Is there any way to help in developping future versions of Zenphoto?
I have already read your code, tristan (i've made the little hack for supporting videos in zenphoto: zenvideo), so, if you need some help, or anything... I'm your guy, tristan !

trisweb

Carasmo -- So YOU were the one! THANK YOU! I appreciate it a whole lot, and that will certainly influence my work a little :-)