This is actually a week-old news, I just didn’t have a chance to blog about it. If you remember my site dedicated to the best CG art on the web, the underlying code was using Menalto Gallery (you’ll find it if you do a search on “Gallery”). This is a very popular choice for a gallery application, mainly because there seems to be no one else out there doing a better job. After a year of using it, I can tell you with some certainties that you should stay away from it. Menalto Gallery suffers from a common syndrome that affects many open-source project: it tries to do as many things as it can possibly think of, whether it makes sense or not, on top of its aging platform. Overtime, it turns into a giant slowpoke. The code looks like an unappetizing spaghetti and it is a nightmare to work with. Tons of questionable functionalities, yet it cannot do the basic ones well.
Then comes ZenPhoto. I stumbled across this gallery application by accident and I must say it is a godsend! It has exactly what I need and none of what I don’t. After playing with it for a few days, I decided to redo CG Art World using this framework. I did it in 3 days over the weekend. Not only the backend is totally solid, I also had a chance to redesign the frontend so it is up to speed to the current web standard. On top of that, I added tagging, commenting and rating systems without breaking a sweat! ZenPhoto might not have a sophisticated templating system, a support for multiple graphic library or album-within-album-within-album feature. But honestly, who needs that? Because of its simplicity, I was able to do what I want after a very small learning curve. Kudos to the team at ZenPhoto for thinking things through before hacking away yet another gallery framework.
I’d also like to thank them for featuring my site on their showcase page!
