I have used quite a few photo galleries in the past (coppermine, gallery, and others) and was never very happy with the "backend" administration side. There were other things left to be desired but this was the main kicker for me. In pursuit of something better I came across plogger. Plogger is hands down the best PHP based image gallery I have ever installed and used. Light weight, super simple administration, bug free (at least for me) and good load times set it apart from the crowd.



After installing it and taking it for a test drive I found that there was no "easy" way to implement Lightbox. For those of you who don't know about lightbox it provides a nice flash-like effect using javascript and CSS. I figured it would be something nice to add to a already awesome gallery program.


First things first the demo gallery can be found here. It is nothing fancy just a demo.

This is not and add-on or just a couple of files it is the whole zip archive that will install and work properly as far as I have tested with firefox, IE6, IE7, and Safari. If there are any problems license wise with me offering this please let me know, you can email me here. I make no warranties implied or otherwise and provide this as-is to use at your own risk. If it works for you great, if it does not sorry. All that being said you can download the zip here.

Plogger3b_lightbox.zip

Starting off the install is the same as it ever was,
1.create your mySQL database.
2.FTP the unziped archive to where you want it.
3.Run the _install.php (I personally like to chmod permissions to 777 prior to this because it makes installs simpler most of the time. *make sure you go back and check your file permissions after install especially on your plog-config.php and admin directory. Removing the _install.php after is a good rule of thumb to.)
3.Go through the install follow directions and when done login *Remember the generated password to make things easy! It can only be changed later.

Now that it's installed lets move onto the settings. Under the options tab it will be the same as plogger by default with one exception. You will see a lightbox options with a checkbox.




Make sure you have this checked.

Under the themes tab there is a lightbox_Classic, you will have to set this to active for lightbox to work.



Lightbox_classic is the only theme in this package that has the lightbox functionality. Perhaps later when I have more time I will set it up to work in all themes but this is it for the moment. Classic was written by Mike Johnson and is a nice clean and simple theme. It makes a good place to start if you want to customize with CSS and for that reason, I selected to use for lightbox.

As you will see if you have the lightbox box checked in the options you loose the picture page with comments. I personally don't care for keeping up with the amount of comment spam that you will get now-a-days anyway so for me it didn't matter. There are a couple of things to keep in mind.

1. The lightbox will display the image caption in the box. Nothing more.
2. It will automatically load all the images on the page into the array so it has the "slideshow". This is advanced with either they keyboard or by mousing over the left and right side of the image.

That's about it. I hope is is usefull to the people who don't want to mess with the php code to get the lightbox to work. If anyone finds any bugs or wants to develop more themes etc. feel free to contact me by email plogger(at)innoshare.com.

tags: plogger, lightbox