Goodbye ZenPhoto, hello WordPress?
That’s right - it has been only a few weeks of tinkering with my site I have come to the realization that I bet on the wrong horse. As my friend Dan kindly reminded me tonight, this happens often. Admittedly, I do get excited about a new method I stumble across on the web, as a result I often dive head first into a project without considering every aspect of the task.
For example, I started this blog with a clear mission, consisting of two key objectives. First, to setup a personal website and second to discuss the methods I use to build my site. The first task I aimed to tackle was integrating ZenPhoto into WordPress. I was able to do so and was pleased with the look I achieved after hours of CSS tweaking. All was well, or so I thought.
Once my site was looking and acting how I wanted it to, I decided to check out Google stats and see what issues I had to deal with in my sitemap. The biggest problem was that Google couldnt index my ZenPhoto installation. WordPress was kicking back 404 errors when crawling my site, since WordPress was unaware of the ZenPhoto installation running beneath it.
Another issue that bothered me was the search function. There was simply no feasible way to integrate the WordPress search with the ZenPoto installation. Even though I installed both in the same database, the search query could not return the values I needed within the WordPress loop.
The final issue I had with my ZenPhoto-WordPress mashup was that the comments, users, tags etc were all independent of the WordPress installation as well. After an immense amount of searching, I came to the conclusion that ZenPhoto and WordPress were not a match made in heaven after all. Also in that search, I determined that my next endeavor towards WordPress photo gallery awesomeness would have to be plugin based.
Jul 9th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Of all the things I’ve read so far, this is the most disappointing. Because it means that there’s just not really good way to do what I need to do.
*sigh*
Seriously, how can they make wordpress so awesome, by itself. And Zenphoto so awesome, by itself, but so totally sucky when you try and put them together.
Seriously, I feel like my brain is going to melt any second now.
Jul 13th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
I’m in the same boat as you. WP 2.5 has improved photo gallery support built-in, but its not perfect, nor is it as extensive as a standalone solution like ZenPhoto. I’m limping by with WP for now, but I sure hope for all of our sake that they iron out the kinks in system soon.