Before I went on vacation I implemented a new image gallery based on this PhotoHandler project on Codeplex that was pointed out to me by Todd Lewis. We already had a photo gallery feature but its a fairly low frills thing, you have to upload images one at a time. My thinking has been that eventually I'll implement one that integrates with Flickr and some day I may yet do that.

The new one was pretty easy to intgrate into mojoPortal, it allows you to just point it at a folder containing images and it does the rest, creating thumbnails, web size images etc. So the idea with the new one is you organize the photos into folders on your local machine then upload the whole parent folder using an ftp client like FileZilla or whatever you use. The folder(s) need to be uploaded to Data/Sites/[SiteID]/foldergalleries folder, but from there you can nest them any way you want.

I did implement a feature for uploading files but the ftp approach is the sweet spot.

You can see my vacation photos using the new gallery here: http://www.joeaudette.com/photography.aspx

Notice how it makes a thumbnail for the sub folders by amalgamating the images contained in it into a thumbnail

So there are 3 top level folders, ChichenItza, resort, and skyline

Its available now in svn trunk for developers and will be in the next release which will probably be in the next few weeks.

Hey mojoPortal friends, I'll be on vacation all next week (feb 9-16, 2008) so probably won't be answering forums posts until I get back.

For the last 3 years I've spent my vacation time working on mojoPortal. Yep, I know "get a life" right? ;-) I haven't been on a real vacation or been to the ocean in about 15 years or so, so I'm really looking forward to it. I'm such a workaholic I would probably never have orchestrated a vacation myself, but my Uncle has a time share in Cancun and through a happy conspiracy with my Father, my 2 brothers and I and my Father are all going on this trip along with several other relatives.

Lots of exciting things going on with mojoPortal but I'm going to try and not think about any of it until I get back.

Recently someone was asking in the forums about adding google maps to the blog. I thought about it and decided to go ahead and add a field for that while I was in there doing some other db work. Its not often that I would make a post where a map would be desirable but I went ahead and deployed it on this site so I could use it for this post and show a map of Cancun. I just implemented it this morning so it will be in svn trunk tonight for anyone eager to have it. I also added a place in Site Settings for the google map api key so it can be used easily in multi site installations. I also added it to the Event Calendar feature so if you enter a location for the event it will show a map on the event detail page.

Of course if you are reading this post via a feed you won't see the map. Its not feasible to use javascript in outbound feeds so you'll have to visit this site to see the map if you're interested.