My suggestion to developers is to stop new features for a while and concentrate on improvement of existing ones. One of the good things I saw on ZenPhoto was its simplicity. If I wanted a complex gallery I would stay with Gallery (Menalto)! ZenPhoto it's already good enough (for me, at least) but some existing features could be much better... I hope I have been constructive enough :-))

Feedback is always welcome. We try hard not to make the same mistake that Gallery once did. But generally getting more complex is the "curse" of getting more flexible.

You would be even more constructive if you could be a little more concrete...:-)

Sure... There it goes some ideas:

1 - some official themes (the ones supported by ZenPhoto developers like for instance StopDesign) are not really fully supported cause a couple of things are missing or working not that good

2 - ZenPhoto developers could spend more time supporting theme developers; themes are very important for the quality of a photo gallery and ZenPhoto currently has only a couple of themes only and not that much amazing like for instance WordPress has...

3 - design of admin panel could be improved by, for instance, replacing help text in third column by links to the same text which could be presented, for instance, on a pop-up window; that would give more space for the really important part, the parameters and like so could give a better view of all parameters to be configured

4 - some plugins could be improved in a way that not much setup would be required from user! They could be improved to become more "plug-and-play" style, I mean, kind an on/off only...

5 - users could have the possibility of coding a header and/or footer file, kind a custom-header.php and/or custom-footer.php for some additional customization

6 - tag management in admin panel is a bit confusing and not working well (some rename/delete/add tags fail sometimes)

7 - encoding still has a long way ahead to become good enough (I'm the "official" English/Portuguese translator and I'm not feeling that happy concerning character encoding :-)))

8 - EXIF support could be wider (there's some huge brands missing!!); this is a very nice feature but restricted only to a couple of camera brands

Well, just a couple of concrete ideas to become even more constructive....

Great suggestions, especially #4. Seems like you really have to know something about coding PHP to use many of the plugins. Check a box, the plugin turns on. Uncheck the box, the plugin turns off.

The other big one for me is the PHP memory issue.

Matt

Let me answer "shortly" (and probably incomplete):

1. Please be a little more specific what is not working well. We of course have not implemented everything like all plugins etc, true. Especially stopdesign is a really complicated theme originally not done by one of us.

2. True, everyone is invited to provide new themes but apparently no one does. Not aimed at you so please don't get me wrong but I observe sometimes a kind of "everything for free but exactly what I want and that now" attitude on the net. You do not get everything for free without doing some work yourself. Making a good theme is quite some work. And of course some peope doing a theme for their own professional portfolio site most likely do not provide it for free as long as they use it. Quite understandable I would think.

3. An idea really worth thinking about, we could probaly just toggle/untoggle that. I did something quite similar with the "usage instructions" on Zenpage.

4. In my opinion Zenphoto's flexibility really plays out on the theme side. If we make all plugins just to enable by click. you will be limited to use them where we place them, additionally themes may become bloated with code many people will not need and have it much harder to customize then.
Additionally we will surely get questions about "how do I make that plugin appear somewhere else". Then we will tell "take the plugin's function and place it where you want and change the css". Then they will complain that they don't understand php and how to do that....:-) So we leave it to the users at all.

5. Would that really make it easier if we had a header and footer? Besides that you can setup any theme to use that anyway (like the zenpage theme uses a sidebar no other one does.). It is not really that hard to do. Anyway we will think about that for the official themes.

6. Ok, I did not notice problems with that. Please if you encounter issue open a ticket with exact details.

7. Well, I am the "official" German translator and I had no issues with that..:-))) There are many factors that this is dependend on to work. I recently noticed that phpmyadmin told me a db table was utf-8, while in fact some fields like title where actually not! So I had the reason for some character display issues.. Encoding stuff is one of the most complicated things it seems....

8. We are depended on users who actually have these cameras to add support for them. I personally don't take photos (coming from illustration and design) and do not even own a digital camera or actually use exif so I can't help with that at all.
Again, everyone is invited to help on that.

These are my opinions for now. I am open for discussion. I am sure sbillard will also say something when he gets back.

I mostly concur with what acrylian has repsonded. We are a small team of VOLUNTEERS! Please remember that. We would welcome any one who wishes to contribute to this probject. It is afterall an open source software so if you wish you can make changes and offer them up to the general public.

As volunteers we will tend to work on the things of interest to us. I'm sure you can appreciate that.

But, mostly, if you wish Zenphoto to improve, you will need to be specific about its defects. Some of the above are specific and we can take them into consideration. But some seem just gripes with no details (#1, what does not work?, #6, what circumstances does it fail? #7, details?)

So, bottom line. Zenphoto will get better in the ways you wish only if you make an effort to contribute. Either by code or by detailed problem reports.