Website Galleries

CMS Galleries

Website development always involves a strategic and tricky balance between searchable content (words/keywords) and images (pictures, graphic motifs and other visual elements such as borders, background colors and so forth). By providing an easy way to edit, update, and add text to sites, Content Management Systems such as Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, and many others provide an ideal platfrom for publishing searchable content. Because their modular architecture provides a flexible system for tailoring the User Interface (UI) and layouts, they are also a great way to add and edit media-rich content. This has been a key to Joomla's success as the leading CMS platform across the globe. Joomla has always facilitated the deployment of words and images on the web, whether photo galleries or single images.

Joomla Galleries

Users of Joomla 1.11x long enjoyed a plethora of open source and commercially licensed galleries over the years. Sadly, some of these extensions are no longer available, such the Smooth Gallery mambot, which in its heyday was THE most popular extension in Joomla's history. If you are looking for a copy, contact me and I will send one as soon as I can. You can check out the full list of currently available extensions here.

Joomla 1.5x

With the release of Joomla 1.5 in late 2007, most web developers anticipated a lag in developing extensions that run natively in the latest version of Joomla. Oddly enough, the options for 1.5 users has not improved - on the contrary. Now that Joomla 1.5 is into its second year, it appears that the very tough environment for open source, php-developers may be a limiting factor. In any case, the field of favailable extensions is less than brilliant. On the one hand, commercial templates (Yootheme, Rockettheme, Bamboo, etc.) have diligently integrated all sorts of Ajaxy, Web 2.0 UI effects, including the many lightbox, slimbox, shadowbox and other flavors of image display options. Those are fine - if you don't mind using the vastly blaoted architecture of most of these templates (Bamboo and Joomlashack are too notable exceptions). The coding tends to be careless and often injects snippets of inline javscript and style markup into the html output, which handicap the site's SEV (search engine visibility). Furthermore, customizing the functionality and appearance of these features is a tedious chore.

There are also standalone extensions, both free and commercial. Probably the best open source (free) gallery display extension is Morfeoshow, developed by Joomlaitalia (some of the documentation is in Italian - if you need help with translating, send me an email - I am completely fluent in Italian). It offers a range of features that allow you to avoid javascript library conflicts by selecting the options most compatible with the setup in your site. I have a lot of experience with Morfeoshow, and can tetify that it wokrs very well. However, its html output is table-based and badly styled. In order to customize in a large joomla project I completed this past December, I had to gut and completely remake the default templates and modules. Some of the javascript parameters are not accessible to the backend, such as turning off the auto-play feature of the slideshow, and so forth. After revising most of the extension, I was able to add an imagefade effect and tooltips to the slimbox display option - all I cna say is that this is the only example of a photo gallery that combines all of these effects. It was definitely not my idea...

Another popular extension isSimple Image Gallery (free) and Simple Image Gallery Pro (commercial). The free versiopn works, but allows very few options for custominzing. The Pro version gives you more flexbility, but adds an exorbitant amount of inline javascript and css. Its performance is spotty at best, especially if when other javascript libraries come into play. I purchased the Pro version and was horrified by what it injected into the pages. I cannot recommend it.

Remaining Options

Okay, you ask, then what are you supposed to do if you want to have add same kinds of fancy image displays enjopyed in other platforms to your Joomla 1.5x site? My advice: do just that - in other words, choose the type of display you want, and then add it manually to your content article or module. In upcoming posts, I will explain exactly how to do that - it is really easy, and it gives the fine-grained control of your site's look and SEV. Just make sure that you choose an effect based on either Mootools or Jquery, whcih are the two leading javascript libraries for Joomla 1.5x. There are some quirks to contend with, but the results will be brilliant!