thanks for this plugin.  it might help me in my application, which is to provide album/galleries which can be edited (ie. new images added, taken away, etc.) through web interface.

> That's my goal eventually, too. Perhaps you can help to
> design/write this plugin? At the moment I'm mostly
> waiting for a design "sanity check" from [[Joey]],
> but any feedback you can provide on the design would
> also be helpful. --[[smcv]]

i have two challenges: firstly, for installation, i'm not sure what all the files are that need to be downloaded (because of my setup i can't easily pull the repo).  so far i have Ikiwiki/Plugins/album.pm; ikiwiki-album; and 4 files in templates/  any others?

> Those are all the added files; ikiwiki-album isn't strictly
> needed (IkiWiki itself doesn't use that code, but you can
> use it to turn a directory full of images into correct
> input for the album plugin).
>
> You probably also want the album plugin's expanded version of
> style.css (or put its extra rules in your local.css).
> Without that, your albums will be quite ugly.
>
> There aren't currently any other files modified by my branch.
> --[[smcv]]

secondly: barring the CGI interface for editing the album, which would be great, is there at least a way to use attachment plugin or any other to manually add images and then create viewers for them?

> Images are just attachments, and viewers are pages (any supported
> format, but .html will be fastest to render). Attach each image,
> then write a page for each image containing the
> \[[!albumimage]] directive (usually it will *only* contain that
> directive).
>
> The script ikiwiki-album can help you to do this in a git/svn/etc.
> tree; doing it over the web will be a lot of work (until I get
> the CGI interface written), but it should already be possible!
>
> The structure is something like this:
> 
> * album.mdwn (contains the \[[!album]] directive, and perhaps also
>   some \[[!albumsection]] directives)
> * album/a.jpg
> * album/a.html (contains the \[[!albumimage]] directive for a.jpg)
> * album/b.jpg
> * album/b.html (contains the \[[!albumimage]] directive for b.jpg)
>
> Have a look at ikiwiki-album to see how the directives are meant to
> work in practice.
>
> --[[smcv]]

i'm new to ikiwiki, apologies if this is dealt with elsewhere.  -brush

> This plugin is pretty ambitious, and is unfinished, so I'd recommend
> playing with  a normal IkiWiki installation for a bit, then trying
> out this plugin when you've mastered the basics of IkiWiki. --[[smcv]]

----

You had wanted my feedback on the design of this. I have not looked at the
code or tried it yet, but here goes. --[[Joey]]	

* Needing to create the albumimage "viewer" pages for each photo
  seems like it will become a pain. Everyone will need to come up
  with their own automation for it, and then there's the question
  of how to automate it when uploading attachments.
* With each viewer page having next/prev links, I can see how you
  were having the scalability issues with ikiwiki's data structures
  earlier!
* And doesn't each viewer page really depend on every other page in the
  same albumsection? If a new page is added, the next/prev links
  may need to be updated, for example. If so, there will be much
  unnecessary rebuilding.
* One thing I do like about having individual pages per image is
  that they can each have their own comments, etc.
* Seems possibly backwards that the albumimage controls what album
  an image appears in. Two use cases -- 1: I may want to make a locked
  album, but then anyone who can write to any other page on the wiki can
  add an image to it. 2: I may want an image to appear in more than one
  album. Think tags. So it seems it would be better to have the album
  directive control what pages it includes (a la inline).
* Putting a few of the above thoughts together, my ideal album system
  seems to be one where I can just drop the images into a directory and
  have them appear in the album index, as well as each generate their own wiki
  page. Plus some way I can, later, edit metadata for captions,
  etc. (Real pity we can't just put arbitrary metadata into the images
  themselves.) This is almost pointing toward making the images first-class
  wiki page sources. Hey, it worked for po! :) But the metadata and editing
  problems probably don't really allow that.