I'm enjoying zenPhoto so much, I'd like to request that you guys think about zenJournal. who needs wordpress when you can have the same simple interface for your blog as well?

I was thinking about it... not out of the question.

seriously? it would fit in so well with the rest of the planned features, like tagging for instance. and you could quite easily adapt the existing comments to be able to comment posts, i guess.

i've been playing around with textpattern/wordpress, etc, and, although quite powerful, they lack the simplicity of what you are doing. anyway, i'm sure you get the message..

I was thinking of this also.
I think it could be extremely powerful to have a Blog integrated with a photo gallery like this, it could result in the perfect solution for personal websites. All most personal websites consist of is a blog, a few pages and a photo gallery.

The trickiest part of integrating the two would be themeing, when you have a package like that, you want to be able to theme them so that they match.

Well... I for one think that WordPress is very well suited to do the job. You can run it as simple as you want.

I only need good integration with WP. Then I would be happy. That, of course means an integration on the design side...

I will write more in a separate post about I want from ZenPhoto in general.

Like you, I was interested in integrating a blog/journal. I hunted around, and found exactly what I was looking for. www.supersimple.org. Its call Super Simple Blog Script - and its just that. Super clean and simple. I was able to integrate it into Zenphoto with little trouble. If you want to do the same, just download and strip out the html from the index.php file, and call on the file within a theme page.

No need. I am actually very happy with WordPress. It is well written and has a large usercommunity as well as developer community. This ensures development and security, something I value.

Making a template in WP is not that hard if you use a well written theme as a start. But I would love to see integration in the backend too. However - as long as it has the right features, I can live with a mere design integration :-)

Wordpress is indeed great, even if it does have some design flaws and UI oddities, and I plan on fleshing out integration with WP before creating my own blog script. It's certainly not needed right now, just something that was on my mind.

My CMS of choice is <a>http://www.textpattern.com/</a>.

It might look good, but the only thing that is good enough today is WYSIWYG editing of articles.

I know this makes the stomache turn on code purists, but if you really want to code, why bother with a CMS? The whole point of a CMS is to make things easier. WAY easier. And also give a lot of new people the opportunity to maintatin websites. Most people today can at least manage to find their way in a simple wordprocessor. But if they have to learn codes to be able to enter text, they will back out. And I totally agree with them.

So I always look for a good WYSIWYG editor for any CMS I am going to use. Right now I am using Joomla for more complex websites and WordPress for blog style sites. That works fine. I really hope ZenPhoto will turn into my gallery of choice. Looks like we will never see ExhibitEngine v. 2.0 . Too bad.

The problem with any editor or system that I am constantly coming back to is caption for the pictures. This is to me such a basic thing that I really think that all other development should be stopped until that one thing is completed. This does not apply to ZenPhoto because it is already in, but most sites I see today do not care about the photographer at all. The journalist is getting credit. Where is the credit for the photographer? The only correct place is under each picture.

Sorry, this turned into a longer post than planned :-)