General Support: Problems with Embedding

Hi...I'm new to Plogger. I've been using Gallery2 for my gallery needs, but I was attracted to Plogger by two things: the promise of simplicity (vs. bloatware) and the easy embedding. Altough G2 has an embedding architecture, I've never been successful in getting it nicely integrated into my personal site, so I had hopes that plogger would prove a good alternative with its three-line embedding.

I'm a little bit skittish about having my first post here be in the form of a complaint, because I've seen a bad reaction to that behavior on other project sites...and understandably so. Please understand that my comment here are just meant to be food for thought for the development team and not criticism of the hardworking people who have made what looks to be a nice bit of gallery software with great potential. But Plogger might not be suitable for my needs at this point.

Here's what I found.

I had hoped to embed Plogger in my personal site, which is run on the b2evolution blogging software. On first blush it seemed like it would be an easy task. I would pass simply the plogger calls through the b2evo templates using a URL ($_GET) argument like so:

http://www.robworley.com/index.php?disp=gallery

This "disp=" argument is used in various places within the templates to divert b2evo from displaying the standard blog entries, and rather display something else instead, which might be addtional info about the blog (e.g. http://www.robworley.com/index.php?disp=comments displays the most recent comments) or even some custom coded modules that I've created (e.g. http://www.robworley.com/index.php?disp=contact displays a custom coded email contact form) .

So, I placed the three lines of embedding code within my template and used the $disp argument to conditionally execute them.

Here are the problems I found:

1) the Plogger globals (e.g $baseurl) ended up conflicting with b2evos globals causing immediate problems. One rememdy here might be, since plogger is meant to be embedded, to make sure plogger globals have a unique prefix to help cut down on conflicts with the software it may be embedded in.

2) When Plogger generates its URLs, it throws away any URL args that my have been passed in. As I stated before, I would need the disp=gallery arg to be passed along with the plogger args. Another I might need would be the skin=something arg. So, it might be cool, when Plogger starts up, to stash these additional args and carry them along when it generates its click-through URLs.

I very much appreciate the philosphy behind Plogger and the hard work everyone has done in creating this software.

Gallery2 has so many complicated features that I do not use, arcane skinning and emedding systems and just generally is not well integrated with my current site.

I do hope to adopt Plogger at some point in the future, but I'm not sure I can get around these hurdles without hacking the code to death and cutting myself off from easy upgrades.