General Support: Some development hints...

Hi,

currently I'm integrating a Plogger based gallery for a website, and had a closer look to the sources.
Two things chatched my eyes:
- why are the shipped libraries (particularly the thumbnail generator library) so old?
- why are you using a external php implemented library for reading a set of exif data, and not the native exif-extension of PHP (since version 4.2.0 available, see http://php.net/manual/de/ref.exif.php)?

Additionally, I miss a function, which rotates some images, when they are not in the landscape format (could be easily detected via the exif entry Orientation).

Greetings, Kastor

First, to #2, I'm not sure why, but the PHP EXIF support wasn't that great for a long time. However, we were looking at a replacement including ITPC.

Second, to #1, I still think phpThumb is one of the better thumbnail-generation libraries, provided you don't need movie or other filetype support (something we never intended).

In regards to development, it has significantly stalled. A few of us have tried to jump-start getting Beta 3 out the door, but it has yet to happen; this may change with localization support introduced by Anti.

In regards to why, I know for me my job has focused me on (Object Oriented) PHP 5.1 and Ruby on Rails for so long now that I almost refuse to write PHP4. However, Mike has tried to retain the large portion of our userbase on PHP4 by making it reverse-compatible. I still see one of the pitfalls of PHP being that PHP users expect everything to be backwards-compatible. Most other language platforms don't have nearly as much of a problem in this regard.

Finally, there's the matter of time. All of us are full-time programmers that do a number of projects on the side. I maintain several sites and apps for university groups to which I still belong, usually dedicate ~10 hours a day to my job, and then spend a few hours reading various blogs and sites, and lurking several support fora, including this one, trying to answer questions and such.

Having the time to contribute to an app that I see as already being outdated before its release is not a high-priority for me, and I suspect that others feel the same way. I would like to see the beginnings of Plogger 1.0 that supports tagging, a filesystem-like category structure, extensible filetype support (to movies, mp3, etc), XML support for AJAX and Flash, a rudimentary multiple-user system, etc.

Man, what a spoilt-programmer mentality. Oh well. :)

Cheers,
Derek

Beta 3, our svn copy, already has EXIFer 1.5. However, we were looking at replacing it for something more robust with IPTC support. We've also (I believe) stripped the libs down to only the requirements for Plogger to lighten the distribution.

Derek