minishowcase blog

Hi all,

minishowcase goes to v09b136, adding minor cosmetic fixes for some ugly lines in the menu items, and a nice yet underdeveloped and undocumented hack: now you can navigate the images by clicking the left and right arrows! To go forward you can also use the Space bar.

The navigation behaves identical as the image arrows, so when it arrives to the end of a thumbnail block it automatically loads the next one.

Hope you like it. There are minor things I still have to check, and my most important milestone is the creation of subgalleries and updating the documentation.

Thanks again for all your support, without which all this improvements would just not be possible.

Finally, minishowcase got password protection for individual galleries.

The script is rather simle, so please don’t use it to protect sensitive data. It relies on a file which name you can change in $settings['password_filename'] inside /config/settings.php. The defualt name is ‘password.php’. It is highly recommended that you change the setting before using passwords, as failing to do so might render the password vulnerable.

So, after changing the name (for example to ’security’), add a file ’security.php’ inside the gallery folder you want to protect and voilà, your gallery will be protected! Users will then be prompted for the password when clicking on the menu link. Unfortunately they’ll be prompted every time they visited the same gallery.

I’m working in a more stable version where you can control how long the password is valid, so not to annoy the users with constant password request.

For the moment, I hope you enjoy the new protected minishowcase.

I just installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and that has delayed all work on minishowcase. Soon I’ll be back with some improvements and bug fixes. Thanks for the patience and thanks for the support.

MiniManage is a Java Application that simplifies the process of uploading and managing files in minishowcase. This project is maintained by Jan Konieczny. From the developer’s site:

What is MiniManage? This is opensource project created initially for my own use to make minishowcase (http://minishowcase.frwrd.net/) gallery management much easier. In other words: I just wanted to let my wife take care of our photo gallery :).

Other reason why I decided to develop such a program is client-side photos scaling. It is much faster to resize your 2MB photo for a web to eg. 800×600 or 1024×768 resolution before you upload it so you can push only 200kB file over your modem/broadband instead of the huge, full-size 2MB picture.
To use my photo-uploader you will have to put a server-side script (soap.php included in the package) and additionoal NuSoap libraries (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nusoap/) in your MiniShowcase Gallery home directory and set a write permission to ‘galleries/’ for a web-server.
If it sounds too complicated…. read my How-to section

Thanks to Jan Konieczny for his fantastic support to minishowcase. Enjoy!

After thinking it better, I decided to revive the community section. However, I might have to let you know that, give the amount of work I’m handling right now and the fact that minnoshowcase is released to the public as a free product, my help on the community might be prompt and speedy.

I’ll try as much as I can to help you with your problems and issues, and I’ll try to fix as much bugs as possible. So if you think you have hit a hole and you have discovered an issue, please post to the community forums.

I would also encourage all of you to visit it often and help other fellow minishowcasers. I’ll be browsing the threads, and collecting the bits of wisdom you share, adding the required fixes to the main code.

Please note that posts that does not follow the guidelines will be disregarded and/or deleted.

Thanks in advance to a community that has helped so much with the gallery’s development.

Hello everyone,

Unfortunately I have decided to close the Discussion forum. Things have been hectic here and the forum has becomed unmanageable for me. For now I’m still considering some small bugs, but for the moment please acdept my apologises and bear with me that minishowcase will continue to be offered ‘AS IS’, so it is any problem that has been documented (most of them) will be ironed out soon enough (I hope) but what you download is what you get.

I sincerely apologise as the community has been an invaluable asset in creating what minishowcase is today, but my other responsibilities refrain me from being able to continue the process as it was.

For now minishowcase is still under development, though don’t expect it to be steady or reliable as I cannot promise it right now.

To all supporters of minishowcase, my most sincere gratitude; without you minishowcase would not be what it is today.

I finally got internet at home, and it is a shame I did not get it before, as I haven’t started my new job yet, and I’d be able to do some work for minishowcase. I’m not very fond of internet cafes and free WiFi here in London seems to be an urban legend. At the end I like to work from home, not in a cafe full of people drinking and eating and talking about Tony Blair’s resign and the Tour de France.

So it seems I’ll be able to resume normal (slow) pace and pick work up from where it stalled.

If you’re expectig a bug fix or a feature, be patient, it’ll come around soon (I hope).

I have finally got a hold on my moving to London, and I’m resuming activities for minishowcase thought quite slowly right now.

As an added issue I had to change Hosting providers as IX Webhosting proved to be less than very reliable with uptimes for my sites.

I’m in the midst of setting up minishowcase in its new repository server and as soon as it is handled, complete operation should resume on my side.

Thank you all for the support, as I’ve been thinking several times to close up the minishowcase project, but it has proven quite difficult given the high reception it still has. So rest assure that I’ll continue working on it towards a 1.0 Release.

Thank you all for the support, and I hope you continue enjoying this little project of mine.

Hi everybody,

so I decided to host a blog where to keep you informed of what’s happening, what has been updated and so. It also cover some sort of online Documentation, but in an easier mode for me, and still searchable by you.

Hope you like the idea, and if you do, let me know so I’m aware it is all going somewhere (for you, of course).