So no one then? I dunno! ;-)
In the end, I fired up a demo instal and spent some time playing with it, it’s really bloody good. I use quite a few open-source scripts and the first thing I do once installed (assuming I can get it installed, many just fall over at the first hurdle), but if it does install OK the first thing I do is auto-update, as I find this a good test; and it worked perfectly.
I then try to add some plugins. Often, scripts that get this far fall over here, but not Pwigo, all the plugins I tired were a one-click install, and all actually worked! Then I tried themes… Same.
So next I set about trying to break it, and failed. It’s really robust with what appears to be excellent support.
So now I’ve added some albums, edited a theme (made really easy by a built-in CSS editor, and got it all set up and running. And as I say, I’m really impressed. It seems to have been built by people who actually use it, as in, pretty much every feature (and there are a lot) works as you’d expect, and offers the setting options you’d want.
Simple things like offering lots of different ways to add photos, from batch web upload, to direct FTP importing, even adding via some desktop apps.
Demo install for anyone interested: CMS Gallery
Obviously this isn’t for anyone who just wants to display some nice standard galleries on their site, for that here are some great stacks (Gallery3 from @Jannis is my preferred option), but if you need to build a really large image repository that is entirely managed outside of RW, this is a great option.
It’s easy to build a site around the main gallery inside Pwigo, but obviously, that isn’t how we do things in the RW world, so I’m working on a way to embed the Pwigo front end into a RW page. On the demo linked above, I’ve set the gallery up with minimal additional features; no main menu, no commenting, no sharing etc., just the basic gallery, so it’s nice and clean for adding to a RW page.
The obvious thing to do to add it to apage is to drop it into an iframe, and that does work, so long as you are careful about the sizing etc. But it’s a messy way to do things. Luckily, a very clever man who frequents this forum from time to time has offered to see if there is anything that can be done with the Pwigo API, so I’m hoping there is a nice simple stacks based solution around the corner (it might be a big corner as he’s busy digging holes and knocking down small buildings!).
Pwigo website here.
If you have any questions I’m happy to try to answer them, I’m only one day into working with Pwigo, but it’s pretty intuitive so I’ve got a reasonable feel for it already.
Fingers crossed, there may soon be a 100% CMS feature rich gallery/portfolio option that is entirely independent of RW but with a really easy way to add it to an RW page.
I have to stress: This should not be seen as a replacement for the existing gallery stacks, it’s way way more complex than that: Think of this an entire image repository system, which can batch edit, manipulate and organise massive image collections. For simply displaying a bunch of images on a web page, it’s way overkill. But for managing, editing and organising hundreds if not thousands of images into many different galleries with excellent user interaction abilities, including the option to sell images online, it’s pretty bloody good. And free!
Pwigo can normally be found in Softalicious inside C Panel, or you can just get it from their website. It requires a database, but the softalicious install does all that for you, or if installing manually it’s just a case of creating said database then adding the settings during the self-install process. Simples.