Geeklog Forums

Yes, the extra time seems to have paid off. You can see the Geekary in action at Tom's site (The Pigstye) or at my own Meager attempt.

You can download the Geekary script Here

I hope you enjoy it. A german translation is in the works, and more features will be added soon(TM).

For those who haven't heard before what the Geekary is:

Features

Image support: GIF, BMP, Jpeg, and PNG

Video support: SWF, WMV, and Mpeg

Audio support: Mpeg, Wav, and MP3

Completely Geeklog security aware, including Random Geekage blocks, site statistics and search.

Comments support

Ratings

Geekards (E-cards)

At this point it is probably important to mention some necessary requirements.

The Geekary was written for Geeklog, so obviously you need to have a functioning Geeklog site.

Certain functions core to the Geekary will only work in properly, if at all, in PHP version 4.

This script uses the GD graphics libraries to create thumbnails. If GD is not installed, every effort has been made to ensure that the script will still function. You can manually upload thumbnails to your Geekary.

Thumbnail creation works best with GD 2.0 and above, but it will work fine with older libraries. If your GD installation does not support GIF images (most installs version 1.6 and above) the script will use the default Thumbnails provided.

What the heck is GC 2.0 or GD Graphics Libraries? How/where do I get these? A link to this would be much appreciated. Especially in the instructions. I see other, more obvious items linked, but not this. Thanks, --Matthew http://www.MAUSdesign.com

The GD graphics library ("gdlib") is a popular graphics library that's often used with PHP. You may even have it installed ...

It has reached version 2 recently, so that's what "GD2" refers to.

bye, Dirk

I didn't include a link for a very good reason. Most people will be running off of a hosted solution, so the graphics libraries are not under their control. You would need to talk to your host to convince them to install the libraries if you don't already have them.

A couple of points:

The Geekary will run without the libraries, you just won't get automatic thumbnails.

You can check if your installation supports GD using a phpinfo file. Create a file in your webspace called phpinfo.php. Put the following bit of code into the file.

Then point your browser to it and search for a section called GD. If you don't see it, you don't have GD installed.

If you are running your own server and you know how to install a module, you can get the GD library at GD Library

Please don't bother to download that if you aren't running your own server. If you try to install it on a hosted server one of three things will happen:

• It will install and run fine
• It won't work and ends up destorying your hosts installation
• You'll get kicked off your host for messing with their servers.

No, I can't help you install the library. I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about it.

I'm working on another release right now to support a different thumbnailer called Imagemagick. If your server doesn't have GD but you do have Imagemagick, be patient.

Nice site, by the way.

Hey, thanks for the comment.. I appreciate the help, too. I found that the PHP version that I have does indeed have the GD libraries installed, so I'm okay there. The only problem I see is that the thumbnail generation quality really sux badly. And, I can find no way to improve them or change them to generate as JPGs. Can they only generate as PNGs? Maybe this can be a future feature in the Geekary settings to control the type and quality? Also, I tried the massimport.php page and really screwed things up. I really would love this to work, but the thumbnails all generate as the same image. And everytime I try and generate them later, I get the same thing happening for all the ones I imported. It was like they had gotten the same thumbnail ID assigned. I had to start over and import them one by one. I stopped after adding about 40 images individually. I have several hundred to go, and I would REALLY appreciate the automation to work. I also found an issue where I changed the name of a category, and found I could not add any more images, so I had to delete it and start over again. Thanks again! This is a great plugin. I love the fact that it is working within the GL security model. --Matthew http://www.MAUSdesign.com

I would like to request one specific feature to be added to an upcoming version if it is at all possible. When I take shots, my image sizes are about 1 MB JPGs and are much too large to post to a webpage without resizing. Anyway, it would be awesome if the scaling could be done automatically upon upload to avoid from having to do it myself. This would be one less annoying thing to deal with and I could just upload them directly. If quality, file type settings and Max sizes in pixels (Horiz. and Vert, like you have already) were added, this would really make this plugin really rock. Thanks!, --Matthew http://www.MAUSdesign.com

> The only problem I see is that the thumbnail generation quality really sux badly. Tell me about it! What you've run into is GD's notorius problem with dealing with Jpegs. Let me guess, you have a GD version between 1.6 and 2.0, don't you? There are two functions dealing with resizing an image, imagecreate and imagecreateTrueColor. Unfortunately, in all versions that have imagecreatetruecolor (>1.6) the imagecreate function was messed up and you get wonky colors. Also unfortunately in versions between 1.6 and 2.0 even though the imagecreatetruecolor is there, it doesn't work properly so I had to default it back to imagecreate. Thus the nastiness. Imagemagick doesn't have that problem but since I was just learning php when I wrote the first version I decided not to waste a lot of time trying to figure out system calls since imagemagick isn't directly supported in php. Give me a few days and I will have a patch for you. >Also, I tried the massimport.php..... I'll get back to you on this. I wrote the massimport function in about 4 hours and didn't do too much error checking on it. I'll see what the problem is and patch it. >I also found an issue where I changed the name of a >category, and found I could not add any more images, so I >had to delete it and start over again. Now that doesn't make any sense at all. Did you check the geekegories admin page and see if they were set to not accept any filetypes? I really am at a loss on that one. Can anyone else duplicate it? >Thanks again! This is a great plugin. I love the fact that >it is working within the GL security model. Thanks I love the praise. Gimme more. Go check out release 1.2 at my site. I just added sub-album functionality to the Geekary. oh, and on the feature request about the automatic resizing, well, you've already seen the wonders that GD can do for your thumbnails. Do you really want that to happen to your full size images? Things will be much MUCH better with Imagemagick so I'll see if I can throw in some routines to resize for you. I take it you want them to resize to the max width and height you set in Geekary Settings?

Isn't it amazing just how much you can get done when you have insomnia? Massimport is now fixed. You need to download it as a separate file from my site to replace both version 1.0 and 1.2's massimport file.