New to Zenphoto, which is easy on the eyes and easy to install. I am running the latest RC2 on CentOS 5.3 64 bit. When I installed it I deleted the albums directory and created a soft link named albums to a directory elsewhere on the machine that contains a large number of pictures is sub-folders, sub-sub-folders etc. Zen automatically created albums from each folder and sub-folder. Great so far.

Now I want to turn off comments universally, is there a way to do that?

I also don't want anybody to see any pictures anywhere in the gallery without logging on and I want different users to be able to see different things, some to see some pictures and some others. Is there some ACL system somewhere (I can't find it)?

Comments: There is an option for that in the themes options. But you have to be using a theme that supports the option. All the distributed themes do, but if you have a theme from elsewhere it may not.

ACL system: please see http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/07/an-overview-of-zenphoto-users/

Thanks for the response. I duplicated the theme I was using so I could edit it and in themeoptions.php changed setOptionDefault('zenpage_comments_allowed', true); to setOptionDefault('zenpage_comments_allowed', false); . But shouldn't there be a checkbox somewhere in the control panel to turn that stuff on and off, not make it dependent on the theme? How does the setting in themeoptions.php work with the comments checkbox in the album edit tab?

With regard to password protection. I can set a password for the site, and I can set a password per album, but I can't have users and groups and assign viewing rights based on the users and groups I create. So the only way to control who sees what is to control who knows which password and I have to track the passwords I assign to various galleries. Hmmmm.

Still great looking software, but how are people handling user access control? Is there a plugin or hack that makes access control more usable?

The setOptionsDefault() function does not do what you want. It will only record an option if it has not been previously set. What you should actually be doing is changing the option in the Admin interface.

The checkbox is there if the theme supports the option. Did you look at the theme options tab?

There are no "user groups" in Zenphoto so you have to control each user individually. But for each user you create you can assign whatever rights you wish, controlling who can see what, etc. The general strategy is to password protect the gallery, assign user id/password pairs to the people you wish to grant access. For each user, assign the albums you wish him to be able to see and any other rights you deem appropriate.

Also to note that there are two types of comments. one for Zenphoto's images and albums and those for pages and news articles if using the Zenpage CMS plugin.