Hey guys,

thanks for keeping the discussion going. My expectations are pretty the same and its fully understandable that the WP community is way bigger and it's easy to create cheap themes there as there's probably a lot stuff that can be reused.

However Piwigo has stuff to offer that WP simpy doesn't have like easy display of EXIF data, the ability to show GPS data on a map. So those things might attract a small community that might be willing to pay a little more to get a first framework up and running.

Responsive design is of course the fanciest word around, I think piwigo has a good workaround to offer a mobile theme here. However it's an additional theme though.

The fact that you're asking about details is valid and should be answered of course, I guess it's still hard since it's pretty obvious where Piwigo is weak compared to current WP styles.

My personal problem is: I know what I would like to see but I don't know whom to ask. Is it a core feature in the piwigo framework that is missing (like font support) or is it all a question of theme that I'm looking for.

Here's my proposal: What about aligning on any "nice" theme that we all would like to see in piwigo and analyze whether thats possible to build for piwigo? I would for example like to see a similar theme like this: http://signup-demo1.elasticbuilder.com/ Don't get me wrong just a proposal in order to get to the details-level

What do you think?

Cheers,

Oliver

http://signup-demo1.elasticbuilder.com/?page_id=126 is a high quality theme ; tons of work behind and not from India, that's for sure! That's a full time job to create it, that why people either hire someone for months or pay a licence which will never allow it to be sell in mass. For instance themeforest license allows you to sell a work from their template only once: so if you want to sell a Piwigo theme derivated from a themeforest theme you will need to pay them for each of your themes sold.

Hi everyone, I didn't reply yet, but this topic is very interesting. I will reply soon.

Serge D wrote:

ok, lets go over your list

* RD - understandable. now to what min for factor you expect to go. Today, PW supports mobile themes which are phone size and then everything above. so we are looking for two themes - one for phone and one for non-phone devices. Themes need to be of the same style for consistency. there could be one theme which work on both size factors, but user experience could be harder to streamline.
* Touch support is somewhat easy to support with right library
* filters - requires better definition of the "smart"
* admin options - this is theme level. GreyDragon, stripped, and similar themes have variety of options. But one need to be conservative as to how much is too much
* Download options - this is touchy topic as many authors would prefer to lock this option down to limit "free" access to full images. PW has already somewhat robust selection of sizes. Making admin area more intuitive may help to address it better.
* Intelligent navigation -  you would have to elaborate. User navigation or admin level navigation. I admit that coming from Gallery 3 background, PW album/photo management is a bit confusing for me, there may be some improvements in the work, but it would be question for PW team
* Gthumb+ - I have created gdThumb which adds more options, but I personally run into issue that in PW, albums and image thumbs are managed by different templates so it is difficult to have streamlined consolidated mix of two. There is a way around it by not mixing two, but I would hope at some point we can mix and match thumbs in one list.
* Full screen images - this is easy with use of plugins similar to Lightbox - i.e. image view full screen is achieved using partial or full overlay. We can even create theme for Lightbox which would take full screen.
* Shiny, glossy... this is personal preference and could be achieved using your own colors.

Compare http://www.pennytaylor.biz/ and http://www.yvonneschleicher.de/. Both are professional sites, first is based of ZenPhoto, second is PW/stripped+gThumb+
Neil did quick migration from G3 which looks simple but slick - http://neiljacklin.com/piwigo/
GDThumb+ did not cover albums, but gdThumb resolves this issue and now you have "tile" thumbs for both modes - http://pww.dragonsoft.us/

I do understand your point to offer pre-canned solutions for 20$-50$, but for that there simply need to be a market for people to offer money for such work.
Example with WordPress is tough, as WP community is much much larger and people are willing to pay money there. There is enough custom work there so same authors can offer packaged goods for few dozen $ as to demonstrate their work which in turn leads to more custom work and reality is that after you do a first complex theme, creating forks is easy.

Hi Serge D,

Thanks for you really fast reply. I also would like to give you a feedback to your points.
But first of all, let me say: I understand the different interests / focuses of the user. Some users want a nice, shiny presentation theme to show 50-500 best of photo - maybe for selling. On the other hand, people like me look for flexible and feature rich theme for a photo archive with 100.000 or more photos. The requirements are different.

So, my feedback:
Responsiv design: This is today really import. The mobile theme is nice but if you have a lot of photos in for a closed user group, it is hard to use. For example: Nobody finds the link to typ in the password, a lot of features from the desktop version are mission (GPS, download, sorting), tried to choose a tags, if you have more than 4000 tags - it is impossible.
I will give you a good example of responsive design - Prestashop (a French Open source Online Shop System) http://demo.prestashop.com/en/?view=front - this demo shows what good responsive design is.

Touch support: Of course, we all use tables. But with a lot of themes it is right new impossible to wipe thru your pics. Good to know, if the implementation would be easy to realize ;-)

Filters: For example in the theme "stripped" I cannot select the sorting by date or creation (sort order) or display a photos in all sub folder, ... . More Over it would be nice to get more filters like "Older then 180 days", "all photos bigger than 5 MB" ... - this features exist in the admin-backend, but on the theme these filters are not available.

admin options: From my point of view. A good theme is so flexible as possible and admins can customize the themes. For example the stripped theme goes the right way. Most piwigo users are photographer - they like flexibility, but not make changes in config files or php code. If I see most of themes today in piwigo, most of themes looks pretty similar. Instead of an really flexible and customizable theme people built clones of existing themes with small changes.

gdThumb: I will test it. For me is important, to have a nice presentation of hundreds of Photos. Today I must use Gthumb+, RV Thumb Scroller and the settings in the theme "stripped" to get a nice, "endless" wall of photos in a folder with a few hundreds of photos. A modern theme should present a huge number of photos in a nice and fast way.

Full screen images: This is really import. The "Lightbox" does not help. If I use the lightbox, I see the photo in a nice way, but I don't have option like download, Maps, EXIF and Metadata. Moreover, the Lightbox doesn't work in all devices well.


As I said, I do understand it is hard to build a theme that fulfill a requirements. I'm just a private person with a huge private photo archive - but I' willing to support the theme development project.

I' looking forward ... ;-)

photo_friend wrote:

....
Full screen images: This is really import. The "Lightbox" does not help. If I use the lightbox, I see the photo in a nice way, but I don't have option like download, Maps, EXIF and Metadata. Moreover, the Lightbox doesn't work in all devices well.

...

To add something to the "Full Screen point"

Check the Full Screen view in Flickr:

1) Standard view with all the additional information
2) One Click to scale up to full screen without any navigation elements, menus or extra information
3 Click on the photo zooms in

Clean and easy to use.


For Example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hagens_world/

Just an idea ;-)

Hi again,

so will we proceed on this with a plan and a group of dedicated ppl? :-) I can set up a site were we collect all requests (I know you have something for that already, I just wanna offer some kind of help instead of pushing only).

Cheers

Oliver

:) self promotion