Gallery API

This module is positioned to be a winning solution for building different galleries and slideshows (or any other representation style) of any kind of media.

Problem description

There were several gallery modules in Drupal each of which implemented its own way of gathering data and its own way of displaying this data. For instance, a module could build gallery from a view of nodes ONLY and display them using a particular jQuery plugin. But what if I want to use another jQuery plugin for the view of nodes? Or use different jQuery galleries for different representation of multiple imagefield?

Philosophy of Gallery API

The idea is to separate gallery building from gallery output and to be able to combine any kind of data with any kind of representation (output) method. We developed the core gallery module (Gallery API) which introduces the following:

1. Input method - builds gallery slides from any source of data
2. Output method - outputs a gallery using a particular method (for example jQuery plugin)
3. Gallery preset - a preset of settings that is used to build a gallery in full. It consists of one input and one output method as well as various settings provided by these methods

Input and output methods can be developed separately from Gallery API core as its plugins. Several methods can be defined in one module.

Gallery package

The Gallery API package has the following methods by default:

• galview - Input method: Views style plugin for Gallery API. Usefull for those who want to turn a view of nodes into gallery
• galimagefield - Input method: CCK Multiple image field for Gallery API. A good one for making galleries from images in a field
• galdjembegallery - Output method based on djembeGallery jQuery plugin. djembeGallery is quite a powerfull and lightweight script that allows to build various galleries and slideshows
• galslideshow - Output method based on the famous jquery.innerfade.js by Torsten Baldes (a very lightweight plugin). The functionality of this plugin is fully covered by djembeGallery but you may still consider to use it if you need only a simple autofading slideshow since it is 3 times smaller

Related projects

• CCK Embedded Field Input Method - input method for Gallery API that creates slides from CCK Embedded Field
• Zoom Gallery Output Method - output method for Gallery API that implements a view style similar to Template Monster (when a big slide pops up when the preview is hovered)