mortenm

what about building in a gallery? seems like ppl are downloading this component a lot around. So why not a have it ready in 5.0?

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stingrey

Mambo is first and foremost a Content Management System.

The devs have purposefully decided to limit its included functions to those that deal directly with content and how to manage it.

This allows people to add the customisation they want afterwards.
Integrating a Gallery component into the install will limit peoples ability to choose alternative image/photo display packages (its a bit like microsoft and IE).

Integrating a package like gallery will increase the size of the mambo download. If you add gallery why not something else. If you take this mentality you have a piece of bloatware you can't customise.

Mambo's power comes from its flexibility and compactness.


My opinion is that it should stay as is.
There are great third party developers who integrate other open-source and commercial packages into mambo.
Also, as the case of Gallery, it was the Gallery devs who implemented the easy configuration with Mambo, I think this is a far better solution.

Have mambo as a simple core product that other dev programs try to integrate with, not the other way around.

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tsturm

Exactly what I was thinking, but was having trouble wording. Especially since there are at least three main gallery components out there... not to mention all of the other modules and component types currently available along with those in development.

Well said, Rey.

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albrown

What better description of content that is on most websites than images? I gotta tell ya that to not "natively" manage a major content factor seems very wrong to me.

I tend to think that this should be a strength of any Content Management System. I should be able to turn off the default gallery component or use it. Without having to dig around and then try packages that may not work the default installation should contain a package that will always work. IMHO

Once again I disagree, the power of the Mambo system is the ease of use for a user, this is the factor that drew one of my clients to suggest it to me over a Nuke or one of the other popular CMS engines. Once installed on the server they can manage the site with very little trouble even adding modules and components without my assistance. This is a far bigger factor to acceptance (on the paying client side of things) than compactness, drive space - even web space is dirt cheap. My time in setting up a system and maintaining it for a user is not.

One of the biggest problems that I see with Mambo is that because nearly all of the necessary components and modules are 3rd party and not core is that they all have their own "flavor" and they do not integrate well together. Kinda like tossing a dozen assorted programmers in a room each with their own task, operating system, and experience level and then attempting to weld all of those divergent ideas together to make a working useful application.

Mambo isn't alone with this problem, Drupal comes to mind here. There are also couple of good examples where the core has gone far beyond the reasonable such as TikiWiki but on the whole Image Management and Gallery Management are becoming core must have features.

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ShutterBC

It almost sounds like your wish is to beef up the media manager, not provide a built-in gallery component. I would say that improvements to the media manager are quite necessary in order to achieve more comprehensive content management -- images are content too, as you've all said.

I've noticed that some gallery systems can read the EXIF data from JPEG files, and in general provide ways to store more metadata about images. I'm thinking that this is going to be needed to some degree especially when we're talking about huge amounts of images on a CMS. Users are going to want to search by keyword rather than browse a sea of thumbnails. (it's still up to contributors to provide valid metadata of course!)