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By dmetzcher on
I've looked at a few modules, and I wanted to get some feedback from the community. I require the following things for a photo gallery in Drupal.
- The ability for users to upload images and add them to a gallery that they create themselves.
- The ability for users to create multiple galleries (as opposed to a single gallery associated with their account).
- The ability for a user to either allow others to add photos to a gallery that they create, or lock it down so that only they can add photos to it.
- The ability for group members (Organic Groups module) to create galleries and post photos into them
- The ability for group members to allow other members of the same group to post photos to a group gallery, or to lock it down so that only they may post photos to a gallery they have created.
- The ability for a user who has created a group gallery to allow anyone to post photos to it (in other words, three options for each group gallery: anyone can post, only group members can post, only gallery owner can post, and this would be per gallery created).
- When posting a new gallery, a group must be chosen for it. If one does not exist for the user to use, he/she will create his/her own gallery. But images must go into some gallery (perhaps a default gallery could be created for users who do not wish to create their own).
- Taxonomy should not be used to create the galleries. Users will not be able to add vocabulary terms. There will be a "tags" vocabulary where users can tag photo and gallery nodes with their own keywords, however.
I've looked at Views Gallery. It seems to have most of these features, except the ability for a user to lock down a gallery so that only he/she can post images to it. It has the groups integration and can lock a gallery down so that only group members can post. There is a feature request for the missing feature, but it hasn't gotten much attention yet. I like the way Views Gallery does things, though. Everything (galleries and photos) are nodes, which makes using views to generate interesting blocks and pages easy.
I've also looked at Node Gallery, which seems to be similar to Views Gallery, although I'm unclear about the full feature set. Does it have all the features above?
The Gallery module exists, and it connects the Menalto Gallery product (freeware) to Drupal, but development of the module seems to be stalled. Also, Menalto Gallery is a separate product... I'd like everything managed in Drupal... with ImageCache being a key player, if possible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm working on a community site and I'd really love to be able to add a great gallery to it so that users can upload photos and assign them to galleries that they create. Something simple for them to use, with the features listed above, would be perfect.
Thanks!
Comments
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I would definitely start with views_gallery as a basis-- it's the most flexible and future proof method available. You should be able to add user level access control to galleries with the http://drupal.org/project/nodeaccess_userreference module. You'll probably also want to enable content permissions to limit access to the userreference field.
Access Control Issues?
Thanks for the reply, WorldFallz. "Future proof" was exactly what I was thinking when I installed and tested Views Gallery, since the preferred method going forward seems to be to use Views for everything possible (and using ImageCache is also important since I'm using it everywhere else on the site to manage image sizes).
Regarding additional access control modules... will these cause issues if I have Organic Groups installed? I've read that some modules that control access to nodes will conflict with the access control of Organic Groups. Specifically, I've been afraid to install Forum Access for this reason (although that seems silly now, since apparently Forum Access works with OG Forum, and OG Forum requires Organic Groups, so... you get the idea).
Re: Content Permissions -- I have Field Permissions installed, which is a replacement for Content Permissions. Should be fine to use that one, right?
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Yep-- field permissions is fine.
As for conflicts with og-- the only conflict is it might not work. The best way to find out is give it a shot-- if the nodeaccess_userreference module doesn't seem to do anything than it doesn't work. I seem to remember having a workaround for that somewhere-- i'll see if I can find it. In the meantime, try it out and post back with your results.
nodeaccess_userreference
Sorry, WorldFallz... I took a look at nodeaccess_userreference to try to understand how I should use it, but I cannot seem to wrap my brain around what I should do with it exactly. Can you elaborate a bit more on how to use it to lock down a gallery created with Views Gallery so that a user can choose to stop others from adding photos to her album?
Thanks!
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I was thinking about this a few minute ago and the answer may have been staring me in the face the whole time. I'm going to try it out tonight, but I think if I specify a view for the field_gallery field of the Image content type I can restrict the selection of a gallery (for an image being created) to a view of galleries created by the user. It sounds so simple that I'm embarrassed that I missed it before, but I just learned that this could be done with a nodereference field.
That should work, unless I'm thinking about it wrong.
It doesn't allow users to create galleries that other people can add photos to, but that was a wish list feature for me, not a must have.
UPDATE: No luck... turns out that the "View arguments" field on a nodereference CCK field only allows for static arguments to be passed to the view. I'd really love to pass the current user's ID.
I just don't think Views Gallery is powerful enough for me right now, which is a shame because it uses ImageCache and I really wanted that.
Gallery
Have you looked at the Gallery module? It integrates the Gallery software with Drupal really nicely, and offers superb control over user permissions.
It's a much heavier install than using Views, but once you have it up and running, it's much easier to maintain. The only warning is to make sure you re-run the admin settings in the module after any upgrades to the module or Gallery core. I find it doesn't connect with each other after changes, and needs a little bump.
Gallery
I had considered using Gallery, but it seems that development is a little stalled on that module. There seemed to be an issue with it being taken away from the maintainer at one point based on the crossed out issue at the top of the project page. The last time it was updated was well over a year ago, so I was a little worried that it wouldn't be quite current (and the fact that it tied into another separate product worried me the most, since updates to that product could break the module, etc).
Are you using it and does it allow for the features I outlined above in terms of users being able to create their own galleries that they can lock down so that others are not able to post photos into them? Does it work well with Organic Groups?
Thanks for your input. :)
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julianna: Can you tell me what version of (1) Menalto Gallery and the (2) Gallery module you are currently running? I'm looking more closely at using it since it seems to have some really powerful features. I noticed that the Gallery module page says:
...but I'm wondering if that's true and whether or not I can download version 2.3.1, since it's the latest release of v.2.3.
Thanks!