Saturday 27 January 2007

Joomla: Flash Photo Gallery - Expose

Recently in one of my Joomla sites (HE), I needed to implement a timeline, with photos for several periods. I needed a component which features a slideshow, with a slider, and which can be organized by categories / albums. If it could support video, it would be even better! And ideally, photos cannot be ripped off ;)

Thank god for Expose! All the above rolled into one flash photo gallery, you can have a number of collections with several albums per collection. And the price for all that is a very reasonable $50. Its very neat, very professional, and is quite customisable. Downsides? Very few that I've found. The backend (Album Manager) is implemented in Flash and is slowish, and there's no indication that anything is going on, when you click any of the buttons. Also, the albums in collections are not opened by default, and I thought I was not managing to create any albums. Infact they were created, however they were not visible at first.

Overall, I'd give it a 4.5 out of 5.

Photo gallery will be live very soon!

PS. Got some customisations to make, I'm thinking of whether I should try writing an extendable component, give my 2c to the world of open-source. Hope I have the time and the will to go ahead with it!