Why didn’t you redesign your photo gallery?
After taking months to redesign Speaking Digital, a major portion of the web site was left with its old design – the photo gallery. I know the design and color scheme clash hard with the current design and color scheme of the rest of the site, but the underlying software that runs the photo gallery is a bag of hurt when it comes to changing the design.
A while back, I actually looked into creating my own theme for the photo gallery. After spending four hours knee-deep in template files and ambiguous code, I decided to scrap those plans and just skin (change the color palette) the current template I was using. The result was a close match to the old design of speakingdigital.com.
After the current redesign, I’ve come to the conclusion that creating a template for the gallery is once again out of the question. Also out the window is trying to reskin the gallery. Now, this may just sound lazy, especially since I market myself as a web designer and developer, but let me explain.
The photo gallery is run by Gallery (no, that’s not some stange joke), which is currently developing the next version of their software. Development has progressed quickly on their end, so much so that I have decided not to work too much with the current version (version 2.3.) My plan is to work on the new version of the software and develop my own template.
My change of heart came after the Gallery team announced they were reworking the software to be much less bloated – check the file size of the current alpha release (4.1MB) as compared to version 2.3 bare bones edition (16.5MB.) With this fat-trimming has come a much simpler layout to the code, making modification and templating much simpler.
Hopefully, the upgrade to Gallery 3.0 will be gentle. There are still some major pieces that will need to be added to the new version that could be deal breakers for me if they are not added (namely, the shopping cart and PayPal plugin that I currently use.) Based on the popularity of these plugins for the current software version, I would expect the developers to make the jump to version 3 as well. In the mean time, I will be testing the new software and will roll-out the upgrade once everything is good to go and I am happy with the final product.