choosing the right product for my site

[zhangweiwu]

Hello. I am looking forward to build a community photo sharing site for
the local community. It is going to be a small site. Now I am looking
for the software combination to suite my needs. I think I am going to
use a gallery and integrate with a forum. Any suggestions? You can
suggest me a gallery and a forum application. Thank you!

Here are all my requirements. Sorry it is a bit too long.


   must have features for my site

   * tightly integrated gallery and forum, the user registered and use
     forum aslo visite the gallery smoothly with same username and password
   * both gallery and forum share the same users and groups
   * work with FTP server, can use a ftp server root as image album
     root, so users can add pictures to the gallery by FTP
   * images can be commented and discussed, and can be rated
   * organizat images by category, something like tree style
   * being able to set customizable properties of an image. E.g "The
     name of the place this photo is taken"
   * multi language support, include Chinese (both simplified and
     tradition), Japanese
   * permission control on listing images. See "what permission is
     needed for me"
   * can handle video. See description below "how video is handled"
   * can handle 'cartoon' or 'image collection'.


     About 'cartoon' or 'image collection'

that means, the user can upload 10 pictures and set them to be in a
cartoon/collection, and all comments, properties, category settings
apply to all of these pictures, when each picture can be viewed
seperately. For example, if I make a comment on cartoon/collection.
"Jack's day" say "that's good work", then this comment should appear on
every one picture in "Jack's day", and the whole cartoon/colllection
share the same rating, the user can only rate the whole cartoon once.
Also the sequence of pictures in a cartoon should be fixed and the
authoer/administrator should be able to set description


     how video gets handled

Allow user to upload a video alone with a image repersenting the video
(could be a snapshot from the video) and the video and its snapshot are
considered one (not two seperate items). Also, allow user to view the
video online as well as downloading the video.

Actually this way of managing video could be as well applied to all
non-picutre items. E.g. a user uploads a zip file containing a video,
it's subtitle and it's index file, then she uploads a image to repersent
the video (or repersent the zip file). The gallery should be able to
take any kind of file as 'video', e.g. flash and unrecognized file
formats like the editable video file produced by Adobe Premiere.


     what permission is needed for my site

for example, anonymouse users can only see a part of all images.
However, this permission control can only work on listing rather then
viewing. E.g. anonymous users only see a list of 200 pictures but if a
registered user give her the URI if an image that is not listed, she can
still see the image. aka if some user kindly enough to give out all URI
for all images, the anonymouse user don't need to reigster to see all of
them.


   Features that better suits my need

   * the gallery stores the image the same structure in filesystem as
     in web page. For example, if there is an album "landscape" on the
     web, there is a corresponding file in fs under the folder
     "landscape". This makes it easy to export the file to some
     external media, like distributing CDROM
   * very tight integration with forum. E.g. a user in the forum send a
     post along with an image, this image is stored and managed by the
     gallery. When the users visiting this forum thread, they see the
     image from gallery as well as other infomation provided by
     gallery, like rating and descriptiong. Also, when a user see an
     image in gallery, she can click 'start to discuss this image' and
     a forum thread is created, image attached. When a user see an
     image which started a thread, the thread should be displayed along
     with this image.
   * user level. We can say, a user who uploaded 100 images and average
     rating is above 2, this user become a powerful user with more
     permissions.
   * user publish article. this is more or less CMS. It's better if it
     has this feature, but without it it works just fine.