Customize Piwigo

A Message from the Team Know that the Piwigo team makes every effort to simplify at best the work of the webmasters for their gallery. Many options are accessible to ordinary users to customize their gallery. Whether these are simple checkboxes either still to add some lines in a file via the plugin LocalFiles Editor. In brief, Piwigo is really very flexible.

On the other hand, when the customization required has not been planed or can't be done with such Piwigo options, requests to personalize of a gallery is going to involve to have a minimum of notions in informatics language from you. The team takes care of the development and of supports of the software daily. Ours role consists in directing you so that you can realize yourself your own modifications. According to our free time to all (we are passionate volunteers) we give more or less complete, precise, sophisticated solutions but we always ask for a minimum of investment on behalf of the applicant. Otherwise it's the same as having a contractor and performers (the latter working cheap!). So you will understand while certain demands do not succeed.

Explicative Introduction

Piwigo is highly flexible to customize. Piwigo uses themes, templates and configurations variables but also allows the addition of CSS easily etc. Here is a quick overview of possibilities:

  • Themes are in the folder /themes. To manage them easily, go to [ Administration » Configuration » Themes ]
    Forwarding : themes
  • Templates are *.tpl files which are in the ./template folder of themes and in the /template-extension folder of Piwigo.
    Forwarding : template & templates
  • .css files are loaded from themes, but can be overwritten in many ways (see below)
  • The local configuration is a set of variables /options of Piwigo which are not in the administration panel of Piwigo as a graphical interface.
    Forwarding : The Local Configuration (LocalFiles Editor)
  • Plugins are powerful in Piwigo: check them on piwigo.org/ext/ or inside your Piwigo in [ Administration » Plugins » Manage ]
    Forwarding : manage

According to the magnitude of customization and the kind of customization you want, we’ve just seen that a lot of solutions exist. Here a guide to help you to find your way:

  • You want to change the display of content, the aspect of a page like colors, borders, font etc
  • You want to change the display, the layout of a page (inverting/moving blocks, adding a logo somewhere else than the banner, etc)
    • be sure it can’t be done by CSS. You would be surprised of can be done only by CSS
    • check out plugins like PWG Stuffs, Extended Description… which add blocks and rich content
    • you need to change the HTML of a page ? The HTML code is in *.tpl files called template, which are written in SMARTY (Read their Doc): Smarty will read those files, and interpret them according to the values given by Piwigo in order to render the final HTML page.
      Forwarding : template.
  • You’re looking for new features or options like “Adding more information about author/picture” “Don’t display such text according to the user/album” “A faster Slideshow” etc
    • first take a look at all the administration pages of your Piwigo (you can also search in that Documentation using keywords)
    • take a deep look at the Local Configuration
      Forwarding : The Local Configuration (LocalFiles Editor) . Many options of all kind are there!
    • if you have enabled a theme and/or plugins, they might have a configuration page in [ Administration » Plugins » The name of the plugin ] or [ Administration » Configuration » Themes ]
      Forwarding : themes
    • still nothing? Ask on our forum if you’ve missed something or if someone has a small snippet of code to help you.
    • If you have skills in PHP and/or Smarty, you cloud develop your plugin using Localfiles Editor or building a whole complexe plugin ( dev )

Warning Never ever change the files provided in the Piwigo installation.
Your Piwigo could become unstable, buggy, and you will loose your changes after each update.

A plugin has been specially designed to avoid that, and allows to change safely files and configurations : Read carefully : The Local Configuration (LocalFiles Editor)

Example of Advanced Customization

 
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user_documentation/learn/customize.txt · Last modified: 2013/12/04 12:23 by flop25
 
 
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