etherfarm

Oculus Is Dead! Long Live Oculus!

Later

17:02 on Saturday, March 05, 2005 • 4 responses

Earlier

While Expression Engine now possesses an amazing Gallery module, I’ve chosen to produce the new Oculus using the standard weblog module. The Gallery module isn’t particularly flexible (yet) and it became clear to me that maintaining a certain degree of consistency throughout the site wouldn’t be possible given the Gallery module’s current feature set. EE Gallery entries can’t have custom fields (used for a variety of features in this version of etherfarm), nor can gallery entries have trackbacks or belong to multiple galleries. I could live without the trackbacks and may in fact remove them sitewide, but I figured if they exist one place on etherfarm, they should exist elsewhere. And while I haven’t yet assigned any photographs to multiple galleries, I intend to do so in the future.

What EE’s Gallery module does provide, though, is a very streamlined means to transform a folder full of photos into an album of EE entries—a gallery wizard of sorts. I don’t really approach my photography in “batch” style, preferring instead the control I get by using Photoshop on each image, but if you’re someone who wants to put up lots of images very quickly, Simon Collison’s tribute to EE’s Gallery module is probably all the convincing you need.

Would I like the Gallery module’s image-handling features to become available in the weblog module? You bet, and I hope it’s only a matter of time until the pMachine team gives images in “regular” weblogs equal treatment.

I’ve decided to restrict viewing of larger images to registered members not because I want to penalize the general public but because if I have to exhaust bandwidth on people, I’ll prioritize them according to degree-of-separation. The larger images appear only on archive pages.

Anyway, here’s the new Oculus. Images you once found on etherfarm will slowly but surely make their way back here, and for the next few weeks, anyway, you can expect a set of new images every other day (EE allows me to future-date posts). Enjoy.