Anyone want to help me bring Coppermine into 2014? Anyone want to help me bring Coppermine into 2014?
 

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Anyone want to help me bring Coppermine into 2014?

Started by baloneysandwiches, October 03, 2013, 01:45:13 AM

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baloneysandwiches

I would potentially be interested in designing an all-purpose touch-friendly theme (open-source, of course) for the community, using modern, lean class-based selectors, responsive design principles, with keyboard accessibility, targeting IE8+. The web has changed a lot in the past three years, and this project has to evolve to the mobile/touch environment or it's ultimately going to wither. Being sensitive to the developing world no longer means catering to IE6. Two billion people are going online in the next two years, and they're going to be on phones running standards-based browsers.

Coppermine's functionality is mostly there already, which is truly impressive. But the markup and CSS is pretty.... rough... With the news today that IE6 is now less than 5% of market share, it's now officially time to move on from some of these design patterns. I mean, hey... jQuery 1.3? really?

The biggest obstacle to modernization that I see is that a lot of the markup doesn't even supply class names. There are major page elements sitting in unclassed divs. There are anchor links that should really be marked up as buttons, because they don't point to an external page. And the class names that do exist are often bafflingly unsemantic. The "curve" theme (best of the bunch, so far, IMHO) uses way too many id's, creating an arms race of selector-specificity that makes author styling a pain. Last, but not least, there just way, way too many tables.

Digging into this fully would require the help of someone who understands the PHP templating structure of the project better than a new arrival like myself. If someone on the team is interested in going through with me and re-classing the markup structure in a couple dozen places, I could be interested in a writing a clean, responsive theme.

Thanks for reading.

pols1337

I can't directly help you out, but /support!

Coppermine is so outdated. 

ΑndrĂ©

I assume everybody supports this feature request, unfortunately this is probably a quite huge job. However, we're currently just a very small team, consisting of volunteers who maintains this project in their spare time. So if anybody is able and interested to rebuilt the theme engine, we're all ears.

astrasuite

Same, full support :)  I'd like to have less tables too ... or css ones, and so on.

Nice to know though that the current Coppermine version is still very good, really works for our needs, even on smartphones.  And we find that new is not always better. 

Like Nextgen on Wordpress is probably the most popular gallery there with over a million downloads.  We used it for a few years (together with Coppermine on our non-Wordpress application), and when they upgraded their program this year, we decided to move everything to good old Coppermine where we have more control and less dependence.  We then used a modified cpmfetch to fetch images into Wordpress.  Perfect, eliminated the Nextgen bloat on our Wordpress application, fast, and with more customized features like fetching only a group of images from a Coppermine gallery, or fetching non-private images.  This cpmfetch app is great.

We did have to modify some Coppermine stuff to fit our needs, like totally eradicating duplicate titles and descriptions to appease Google Webmaster, etc.  Coppermine is still serving us well ...

As Andre noted, though, it seems like a huge task, but it would be good  ... we can help as beta testers :)

phill104

Of course, I support it fully, but as Andre says, it is a big job for a small team. I would love to use the Twitter bootstrap and base the engine on that. It is fully touch device ready and would make it very easy indeed for a user to create a new theme.

There is already one theme created by a user doing just that - http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php/topic,76309.0.html
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Dion

Quote from: baloneysandwiches on October 03, 2013, 01:45:13 AM
I mean, hey... jQuery 1.3? really?
Long-time lurker, first-time poster. With very minor changes to functions.inc.php and init.inc.php, you can load whatever version of jQuery you want into Coppermine. In functions.inc.php, find the js_include() function and comment out the following lines:

if (!file_exists($filename)) {
return;
}


And in init.inc.php, replace this line:

js_include('js/jquery-1.3.2.js');

with this line:

js_include('http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js');

You will now have the latest full-browser-support version of jQuery being loaded from Google's blinding-fast edge cache servers. This little change also opens up the door to loading any external script.