Is there a HOW-To for more advanced customizations?

[slausen]

Hi-

I have the gallery up and running now, and it looks like it may be just what is needed

But I have some questions about doing some things to integrate the gallery with another website, more involved than what is possible by modifying the theme files. For example:

1)putting the Coppermine gallery output inside an inner table, but having the menu on the outside, like this:
___________________________
| company menu                         |
|___________________________|
|                                               |
|     CPG menu with Nav Bar btns   |
|___________________________|
|                                               |
|  my custom content                  |
|___________________________|
|                 |                             |
| more         |                             |
| custom      |  CPG Gallery            |
| content     |   Output                |
|                 |   _____________   |
|                 |  | custom           |   |
|                 |  |_data________|   |
|__________|________________|
|                                               |
|  my custom content                  |
|___________________________|
|                                               |
|     CPG footer with Nav Bar text  |
|___________________________|
|                                               |
|     company footer                    |
|___________________________|

2)making the display logic for specific custom fields conditional (based on group). The use case for this is that I want to store a external system PART_ID in a custom field, which would only be visible to users in a certain group.

3)adding my own custom code (iframe includes) to the gallery output so that I can pull in information from other systems based upon this PART_ID as well as other data and display it along with the images.

I understand that this will require custom coding, I was just wondering if there was an overview or Developers' Guide as to the best way to make these kinds of changes, so I can focus my efforts. I have searched the forum archives and /docs directory without success and I didn't see anything on Sourceforge. Thanks.

[slausen]

Hmmm...

So I guess the lack of replies would indicate "no" 

Can anyone recommend a good starting point for making these kinds of changes then?

[Paver]

No replies means that none of the people who have read this post have any information to provide.  Supporters don't post unless they have something to contribute.

No there is no advanced documentation for developers.  The code itself is fairly well documented and fairly well organized so with a good searching tool, you can follow code from script to script.

I don't understand why you cannot do what you want with the theme system.  theme.php includes both template variables for you to lay-out the HTML with special tags (like {STATS}), and the theme functions process these template variables with lots of logic where you can place your conditionals.  There are already a lot of conditionals already present - e.g. admin buttons below a photo.

If you want an admin panel for your site (to use a web-based interface to select allowed groups for example), you might consider writing a plugin.  My "Full-Size Photo Access" plugin shows a simple way to select groups on a web-based panel that are allowed to view full-size photos.