Development

Geeklog 1.4 introduces a new feature “Remote Authentication”. The motivation behind this core feature is simple: Users do not want to sign up at every site they visit to post a comment, and site administrators do not want to allow anonymous comments due to spam and other factors. Remote Authentication solves this problem by allowing people to login to your Geeklog site with their login credentials for another, established service.

Firstly, a caveat to users, the Remote Authentication feature in Geeklog requires you to expose your password for the remote service when logging in. An unscrupulous systems administrator could modify the code to capture your password. Do not use this feature on sites you do not trust!

Remote Authentication ships with support for LiveJournal.com and Blogger.com accounts. When correctly configured the Remote Authentication system will allow registered LiveJournal or Blogger users to login with their remote account to your Geeklog instance. This feature is disabled by default, to enable it you must set the $_CONF['remoteauthentication'] variable to true in your config.php file, and disable user submission (set $_CONF['usersubmission'] to 0).

When enabled, each login form will include a drop down box of supported login services. The default option is your Geeklog site, listed with the text from your site name configuration from config.php ($_CONF[‘site_name’]). You can add or remove sites used for authentication simply by adding and removing authentication classes from $_CONF[‘path_system’]/classes/authentication. For example; to disable LiveJournal support, delete the LiveJournal.auth.class.php file.

Since we don't seem to have enough options for photo gallery plugins, I've packaged up a working version of the Geeklog-Gallery2 integration plugin.

It's a bit skimpy on features and documentation at the moment, but my testers seem happy with it up til now! [Thanks Ajay, Wayne, and John!] I'm releasing it because people have been waiting for a long time and I wanted to give them something useful to play with.

This version installs a random photo block by default and allows you the option of having the G2 control block as a geeklog block or left alone as part of the G2 page.

You can get it through my geeklog software page.

-Andy Maloney

A beta release of the Media Gallery for Geeklog is now available for public consumption. It is available for download in the Geeklog Download Section or at www.ecsnet.org You can also see it in action at www.ecsnet.org

Media Gallery is a native plugin for Geeklog that provides a full featured media gallery, including photos and movies. If you have any issues with this plugin, please post your comments, feedback, bug reports, etc. in the Plugin Support Forum.

Features

Media Gallery attempts to take advantage of many of the features made available through Geeklog. The feature list includes:

• Multiple Media Types Supported (JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, ASF, WMV)
• Multiple graphics package support (ImageMagick, NetPBM, GD)
• Center Block (featured album)
• Autotags for including links / images in stories
• Comments per media item
• Upload queuing
• Random Image block
• Online Photo Printing Services
• Geeklog Security Model
• Multiple methods to add media
  • Direct Upload through Admin Interface
  • Batch FTP Uploading
  • Windows XP Publish to Web (experimental)
• Flexible Geeklog template support
• Unlimited Album->Sub Album support
• Full integration with Geeklog search and stats

The goal is to provide a full featured method to allow webmasters to display their photo's and other media items.

If Media Gallery does not suit your needs, I recommend you look at the Inmemoriam Media Gallery also available for download in the Geeklog Download Section. Each plugin has it's own set of unique features and functions. Now there are simply more options for an true native plugin.