Thumbnail galleries

I originally posted this for UBB, but something tells me it's about time I change software I'm sick of dealing with complicated hacks, and I was simply wondering if the following feature would be hard to create for vBulletin :

Basically what this hack would do is to create thumbnail gallery where people could post their wallpapers and other graphics, have them sorted in different categories etc. and all of this based on the VBB community software.

I created some screenshots to illustrate what I'm trying to explain.

Posting a 'New image' (instead of 'New Thread')



This is what the post would look like :



And finally, the alternate forum display page with screenshots :



Now I don't know PHP that good at all, so I think it's rather pointless that I try to go further than this.

I was just hoping that someone would catch this idea and develop it. Knowing the capabilities of PHP, this type of feature shouldn't be too hard to create. The real problem would be to get it to blend with the forums correctly.

I know for a fact that this feature would be perfect for many sites out there and I'm sure all of you digital art lovers would like it too!

Ovegrow's hack is the closest thing I've come to finding something similar.

Tell me what you think.
Pe<|ce

PS. I originally posted this in the 2.0 suggestion forums, but I realized that this might be a better place to discuss it. Sorry about that

This seems like a great idea to me... the hack for ubb... might be able to be ported over to php to work... but don't look at me.. heh, I am just now learning php.. so I can't do it yet..

Thing is, this hack doesn't exist even for UBB. I thought I could try to make it in PERL, but I gave up I realized that it would be a lot wiser to use PHP for this hack, and that's what lead me to VBB in the first palce

I was inspired by Skinz.org who have a beautifully built engine for rendering their pages (all in PHP of course). I thought it would be great to get the same kind of display system for the forums, in this case VBB. Implementing this to UBB was a lost case. Too much hassle...

But if there's an inspired PHP coder out there who could pull this off, I'd be happy to give him/her a lollipop This feature would be great for graphic sites and others who would want to display pictures.

[Freddie Bingham]

It could be done but you could encounter problems making the thumbnails.

1 - You could use the GD library to do it with 2 caveats.. firstly it's thumbnails look like crap and secondly gif support has been removed (though you can still find it or use an older version). Using the GD library really isn't an answer if you want everything to work and look great.

2 - You can use a external source to creade the thumbnails such as imagemajick or NetPBM. You have to go out, get these packages and install them on your system first though.

[tubedogg]

I like this idea...I don't have much use for it, but the screenshots look cool LOL

On a slightly related topic...I'm so mad about GD not supporting GIF anymore. I have a thing that dynamically generates the date and a couple other words in a very small font, and it looks like crap in JPG

Here's something pretty close to what I had in mind, although I have to admit the display sucks :
http://www.imagearcadia.com/

Perhaps this hack could be included in future versions of vbPortal?

[Freddie Bingham]

tubedogg: http://www.rime.com.au/gd/

[tubedogg]

Thank you, Freddie

Unfortunately, I'm on a virtual host and he probably won't like the idea of installing that (he's in England and the server's @ VDI). But thank you for the link anyway, I'll send it to him.

Well, this is turning out to be a lot more complicated than I expected...

I found a php script that would do the job (create the thumbnails) but it needs that GD thing installed, which makes this hack a pain - if not impossible - to install for many people out there.

On the other hand, I did run into a free perl script that would generate the thumbnails without having to install anything extra on the server. I included the code as an attatchment.

Any ideas on how to proceed? or should I just forget about this and move on with my life?

[tubedogg]

Actually that PERL script appears to just resize the images via height & width tags, it doesn't actually create thumbnails (at least that's what I got from reading the site).