[cpgimagethumb:2,IMG0689.JPG] I’m trying pretty hard to find a way of storing and organising my digital images, and then integrating the collection smoothly with Wordpress, without much success to date. I’ve been through a couple of flickr plugins, one of which I couldn’t get to work at all, a plugin that just takes folders from within WP and treats them as albums, and at the moment I’m playing around with a Coppermine plugin.
The Coppermine plugin is looking fairly interesting so far, because I was able to install Coppermine itself so easily onto my site, thanks to a nifty script centre provided by my web host, but at the moment the integration with WP is hit and miss. I can link to images that are in coppermine fairly easily - see the photos in the right column for an example of this - but there’s a sense of disconnection between the two while my Coppermine stylesheet is so different from the WP stylesheet. Using the excellent Run PHP plugin, I can also call up images from a gallery and display them easily in posts, and I’ve started using the CoppermineSC plugin to display images in posts as well as in the sidebar. I was running an old version of this plugin, which I’d hacked to modify the style of images in posts, but with the latest version, I’m finding that defining the styles in the theme stylesheet is working fine.
But it’s not quite what I’m looking for. I don’t like the sense that a user has to dip out of WP and into Coppermine. I’d rather give the impression of seamlessness. It will do for now, though. Having said that, one of the new features is the ability to pluck random photos from the galleries, which I’m using in the sidebar, and I think if I twea the plugin and my css a little more I’ll have all the control I want over how the images are displayed in WP.
Sometime soon, I’m going to install Gallery 2 on my site and see how I get on with that, since I’ve heard some good things about it, and I’m aware of plugins in development. Unfortunately, since G2 is still in Beta, it’s not included in my web host’s scripts, so I’d have to do the hard work myself, and I don’t think I have time right now for that.
Watch this space.