[blog...]

"Could you please add a simple image gallery to the website!"

This requirement of customers sounds easy but with TYPO3 the developer gets nervose and starts to search the TER if there is any new, maybe perfect image gallery. But there is ... none :-(

With wordpress you need maximum 5 minutes to install e.g. NextGEN Gallery where you have everything you like: gallery, albums, categories, lightbox, sorting...

Back to TYPO3 you first have to decide: Do I use DAM (Digital Asset Management) or is it necessary to install the whole DAM for a simple gallery? With DAM, I use e.g. ce_gallery. Of course, I had to patch it to make it work, like I want, but you have to patch all TYPO3 galleries to fit your needs.

But now, I wanted to avoid DAM. And I tried the following three galleries:

• YAG (Yet Another Gallery)
• chgallery
• wt_gallery

YAG is for sure the most impressive extension in development and uses all modern programming technologies. But it is HUGE. Why do I need >50 classes and 10 MB of source code for showing some images? And that's not all. Some more extensions are necessary: of course fluid and extbase and pt_tools and pt_extbase.

My main problem was the flash uploader which seems to make stupid file permissions on one of the servers. That's why I dropped this solution. Also the plenty of exceptions in the logfile made no impression of a trustable pice of software. Lets wait some months and have a look again!

What is quite nice: YAG comes with its own lightbox. And you can install themes, other lightbox and configure a lot.

chgallery still uses the ereg()-function in the wizard for the image titles. That's why I deleted it immediately an tried wt_gallery.

With wt_gallery, you have to install wt_doorman and you're done. But... currently I forgot why I didn't like it.

At the end, I choose chgallery with pmkshadowbox. The configuration is easy if you don't make the mistake to check "Use Single view" in the Gallery view. In this case the lightbox-code is removed and you have to add another plugin to the same page with the Single view inside. It took some hours to figure this out and finally, I debugged the source code to understand the configuration.

My template setup-configuration for chgallery is now the following:

# enable lightbox (pmks-shadowbox) in gallery view of chgallery
plugin.tx_chgallery_pi1.gallery.image {
 file {
 width = 100c
 height = 100c
 }
 imageLinkWrap = 1
 imageLinkWrap {
 enable = 1

 typolink {
 title.field= tx_chgalleryTitle

 parameter.override.cObject = IMG_RESOURCE
 parameter.override.cObject {
 file.import.data = TSFE:lastImageInfo|origFile
 file.maxW = 800
 file.maxH = 600

 stdWrap.postUserFunc = user_replaceSpaces
 }

 # used lightbox is pmkslimbox
 ATagParams = rel="lightbox"
 ATagParams.override = rel="lightbox[presentlb{field:uid}]"
 ATagParams.insertData = 1


 }
 }
}

plugin.tx_chgallery_pi1.single.image < plugin.tx_chgallery_pi1.gallery.image


Now you can add perfectlightbox or any other lightbox-clone as extension to your site. Usually you have to include the static template of the choosen extension. I choose pmkshadowbox.