KODA

…for an attractive PHP gallery app has begun. Polishing up the theme and design for the blog here has gone so well that I think I’m going to call it mostly complete for now. I also took some time today to write up a custom 404 (and other) error handler for chromakode.com. I’m not sure if the devil truly is in the details… it sure is fun to dive into a little detail every now and then.

It’s time to start filling in the other sections of this site. I’ve been hoping to tackle an art gallery next, but it seems that every open source gallery system I check out turns out looking less than my hopes. I don’t know if I’ve becomed spoiled over at deviantART, but the demos and interfaces I’ve seen all seem to be based around the same clunky forum-ish page layout. Thumbnails are painfully small, the user interfaces are cluttered, distracting, and based on ugly web forms. And if you’re looking for a serious gallery layout, the standard white is about the worst color to choose for a background – dark gray and black can bring out so much more color in your images!

I’m hoping that perhaps Coppermine will have a flexible enough theme system for me to address most of these critiques – though I’m not holding my breath. Perhaps what I’m looking for is needs to be much simpler. I’ll be searching for alternatives over the next few days – we’ll see what turns up. I really hope that there’s a cleaner gallery system out there – surely someone else has had these thoughts before!

Good night!