After some 4 months of late-night slogging and going through my entire collection of swear words several times, I got my photoblog or photoblog up.
It is based on Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign templates. They are really beautiful.
Why you should check this out?
1. It protects your images
2. Your pictures are kept in galleries and they are in turned linked up at the index.
3. You tag description with your photos.
4. Beautiful
When you can’t use this.
1. Storage space. For every picture you upload, it generates another image and a thumbnail. So space may become an issue.
2. It is easier to use Picasa et al, export to html function.
Getting it to work is another different story.
You can install the templates and the associated plugins, about eight of them. Alternatively, you can use the Photo Gallery plugin made by Bryne Reese.
This post covers the installation of the Photo Gallery ver 1.7 on Movable Type ver 3.3
The installation portion is quite easy, just follow the instructions and ftp the folders into your web server. Configuration of the plugin is slightly tricky. The photoblog you should specify a different path. Do not make it a subfolder in your current Movable Type blog. The pathname to specify should be the pathname in your mt-check.cgi output. Edit to show the new path.
For example, if mt-check.cgi reports:
/home/hsphere/local/home/yourname/yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mt
change to:
/home/hsphere/local/home/yourname/yourdomain.com/photoblog
To post new entries in your photo blog follow the plug-in documentation to use the special link to load the file. You cannot use Movable Type standard “Create New Entry” form.
Troubleshooting Photo Gallery plugin
1. You should see something similar to this even there are no pictures loaded. If it is a blank page, user PSPad to check the templates files are in DOS format. The templates are located:
plugins\PhotoGallery\templates\meta\templates\general-php
2. If you are getting “Permission denied” errors:
Error making path ‘/test’: mkdir /test: Permission denied at lib/MT/FileMgr/Local.pm line 107
This is due to the wrong path entered for your blog.
3. If you are deleting your blog and get “Can’t locate object method”:
“Permission denied.Can’t locate object method “id” via package “MT::Callback” at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 3937.”
It is Movable Type’s way of telling you do not have enough permission to delete. Logout and login as an admin to delete.
4. The Photo Gallery plug-in has two types of templates, PHP and HTML. When switching from HTML to PHP, you need to disable/delete index.html in most of the folders or you will not be able to see the latest updates.
Next, I will cover how to do a mass or bulk import of multiple pictures into Movable Type. For now, I leave you with this