Hello module developers!

We're currently looking for the community to take over a gallery module (http://silverstripe.org/gallery-module) that was initially built by employees of SilverStripe Ltd. It is marked as "Not supported", because the current maintainer Josh has left the company, and is no longer involved in the SilverStripe opensource community (AFAICT).

If you are currently using the module, and perhaps have customized it a bit, you're the perfect candidate to take on the role as a maintainer. We've documented what this means here: http://doc.silverstripe.org/module-maintainers

Now, there's a lot of bullet points on the "what do we expect?" list, but frankly every maintenance is better than none at all. First and foremost this would be compatibility of the module with SilverStripe 2.4.

Here's a list of bugs and feature requests (don't let that scare you, we have a couple of hundred open tickets for the core hehe):
http://open.silverstripe.org/query?status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&component=Modules+-+gallery&order=priority&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone

So, if you're keen, let me know! :)

I guess it would be good to see it brought up to scratch rather then killed off. Well at least it would give the Image Gallery Module (http://silverstripe.org/imagegallery-module/) a run for its money.

I just created an account to respond to this. I have been messing with SilverStripe for a few months now and mostly lurked in the forum. I am not a PHP,Java,HTML,CSS guru. But I cant look at the code and know what it does.

I currently have this module working for the current SilverStripe release. I would be interested in maintaining but with limited time available. I have maybe 3 hours a week available for silverstripe tinkering and if I'm maintaining the module for myself, I might as well let others enjoy the benefit.

I'll take a look at the list of bugs and problems and see if I can tackle it or at least check off what I already did.

Bugs for IE6 support should be thrown out. IE6 is end of life and recommended not to be used by almost all security companies. Efforts in supporting a broken and dead browser are probably not useful. A couple of them are also user error and not bugs. I.E. Files ending in .JPG dont show up. user failed to configure module for uppercase file extensions. Documentation needs to be fixed to cover that.

Some of the bugs listed I can not replicate, or I have not seen that problem manifest it's self. I may have on accident fixed them. Most of the changes I made were from the forums in how to fix a problem here and there just to get it to work for myself.

Yeah! Give me a run for my money!

Hey Tim,

Thanks very much for your response :)

> I have maybe 3 hours a week available for silverstripe tinkering and if I'm maintaining the module for myself, I might as well let others enjoy the benefit.

I don't think any module maintainer here spends significantly more time (unless its in a client context), so thats perfectly fine :)

> Bugs for IE6 support should be thrown out. IE6 is end of life and recommended not to be used by almost all security companies.

If you're the maintainer, its your call where to take the module roadmap. I guess most of the IE6 issues would come from the javascript library used for the lightbox-style display, in which case its just a matter of picking one that does support IE6 (or making it easy to switch to a different library with the same markup/PHP code). But in general, as long as you clearly denote it, I don't see a problem with dropping IE6 if you feel you can't maintain it.

So, do you perhaps want to start filing patches against the open tickets (or any unfiled bugs you might've fixed already)? If you could post your progress here (at least at the start), it makes it easier for me to track. Once we got the ball rolling, I'll set you as the maintainer on the ss.org listing.

Filing initial patches may take me a lot as I rolled everything in just to make it work. I really did not document it as I figured that as the module was unmaintained, I was going to have to maintain my own private copy, so I went with the "just make it work" method. I guess I could deliver a point release of the code I have now and then start doing proper patch releases.

I would rip out the current lightbox, I looked at upgrading it when I ran into a bug in it and the website, and everything related to it is gone or incredibly old. I have not researched anything else to replace it yet, but I personally want to stay a "no flash zone" and stick to javascript and css, or html5 as much as possible.

I fixed the errors when using the current gallery module in the current release of SilverStripe. I also fixed the "lightbox" position problem that shows up in some browsers. I also ripped out the section in it that was doubling up on the sidebar menus. It may not happen in some themes, but the theme I have it was creating duplicates of all the site menus. It seemed to be out of place to be calling to display menus in a module. Those are the ones off the top of my head. I know there are others that I fixed that I just cant remember right now.

If someone else wants to test what I have, please let me know and I'll send you a tarball of my current code.

A couple of things I would like to add to it. Right now it appears at the top of the page and any page text appears below it. I would like to reverse that as I believe most would like to put any gallery "flavor" text at the top. I also would like it to clean up it's look. Give it the ability to be centered, left or right justified as per the users desire. I do not know any other languages so the translations outside of English will have to be maintained by someone else. (I Blame public american schools)

That's all I can think of right now.... Thanks.

> Filing initial patches may take me a lot as I rolled everything in just to make it work.

I think untangling these to a certain extent will be a necessary step to keep the module maintainable going forward - we can't just do a big "fixed some bugs" commit ;) That being said, its not *that* hard to achieve this (assuming you can roughly remember what you've intended with the fixes). I'd suggest you check out a fresh copy of the gallery module by svn, and do a "diff" on the whole directory tree to see whats changed. There's lots of tools to help you do this, for example the Eclipse IDE, FileMerge (free for OSX, comes with Xcode), http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/ etc.

Once you have the diff, I'd recommend that you incrementally copypaste them to the clean svn working copy and generate patches via "svn diff". In case you want to learn git, this would be the ideal time, as it'll be much easier to generate patches that way haha (I can give you some pointers if you're keen).

> I would rip out the current lightbox

I think making the PHP/templates independent of the js lib implementation is a good goal to aim for - which means you could just add another lib and make it the new default. But yeah, don't waste too much time fixing a thirdparty js lib thats no longer maintained (if thats the case).

Ok, sounds like a plan. I need to get a Dev box together that I can dedicate to this for a testing playground instead of doing it all on a separate install at my hosting provider. that way I can do this in a complete *nix environment.

I have no experience with Git so any pointers would be helpful.