thanks for this plugin. it might help me in my application, which is to provide album/galleries which can be edited (ie. new images added, taken away, etc.) through web interface.
+> That's my goal eventually, too. Perhaps you can help to
+> design/write this plugin? At the moment I'm mostly
+> waiting for a design "sanity check" from [[Joey]],
+> but any feedback you can provide on the design would
+> also be helpful. --[[smcv]]
+
i have two challenges: firstly, for installation, i'm not sure what all the files are that need to be downloaded (because of my setup i can't easily pull the repo). so far i have Ikiwiki/Plugins/album.pm; ikiwiki-album; and 4 files in templates/ any others?
+> Those are all the added files; ikiwiki-album isn't strictly
+> needed (IkiWiki itself doesn't use that code, but you can
+> use it to turn a directory full of images into correct
+> input for the album plugin).
+>
+> You probably also want the album plugin's expanded version of
+> style.css (or put its extra rules in your local.css).
+> Without that, your albums will be quite ugly.
+>
+> There aren't currently any other files modified by my branch.
+> --[[smcv]]
+
secondly: barring the CGI interface for editing the album, which would be great, is there at least a way to use attachment plugin or any other to manually add images and then create viewers for them?
+> Images are just attachments, and viewers are pages (any supported
+> format, but .html will be fastest to render). Attach each image,
+> then write a page for each image containing the
+> \[[!albumimage]] directive (usually it will *only* contain that
+> directive).
+>
+> The script ikiwiki-album can help you to do this in a git/svn/etc.
+> tree; doing it over the web will be a lot of work (until I get
+> the CGI interface written), but it should already be possible!
+>
+> The structure is something like this:
+>
+> * album.mdwn (contains the \[[!album]] directive, and perhaps also
+> some \[[!albumsection]] directives)
+> * album/a.jpg
+> * album/a.html (contains the \[[!albumimage]] directive for a.jpg)
+> * album/b.jpg
+> * album/b.html (contains the \[[!albumimage]] directive for b.jpg)
+>
+> Have a look at ikiwiki-album to see how the directives are meant to
+> work in practice.
+>
+> --[[smcv]]
+
i'm new to ikiwiki, apologies if this is dealt with elsewhere. -brush
+
+> This plugin is pretty ambitious, and is unfinished, so I'd recommend
+> playing with a normal IkiWiki installation for a bit, then trying
+> out this plugin when you've mastered the basics of IkiWiki. --[[smcv]]
+
+----
+
+You had wanted my feedback on the design of this. I have not looked at the
+code or tried it yet, but here goes. --[[Joey]]
+
+* Needing to create the albumimage "viewer" pages for each photo
+ seems like it will become a pain. Everyone will need to come up
+ with their own automation for it, and then there's the question
+ of how to automate it when uploading attachments.
+* With each viewer page having next/prev links, I can see how you
+ were having the scalability issues with ikiwiki's data structures
+ earlier!
+* And doesn't each viewer page really depend on every other page in the
+ same albumsection? If a new page is added, the next/prev links
+ may need to be updated, for example. If so, there will be much
+ unnecessary rebuilding.
+* One thing I do like about having individual pages per image is
+ that they can each have their own comments, etc.
+* Seems possibly backwards that the albumimage controls what album
+ an image appears in. Two use cases -- 1: I may want to make a locked
+ album, but then anyone who can write to any other page on the wiki can
+ add an image to it. 2: I may want an image to appear in more than one
+ album. Think tags. So it seems it would be better to have the album
+ directive control what pages it includes (a la inline).
+* Putting a few of the above thoughts together, my ideal album system
+ seems to be one where I can just drop the images into a directory and
+ have them appear in the album index, as well as each generate their own wiki
+ page. Plus some way I can, later, edit metadata for captions,
+ etc. (Real pity we can't just put arbitrary metadata into the images
+ themselves.) This is almost pointing toward making the images first-class
+ wiki page sources. Hey, it worked for po! :) But the metadata and editing
+ problems probably don't really allow that.