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I am very happy to announce that the TamaTalk Gallery is open again! This has been a long time coming and I am so sorry for the delay. I have some good news and bad news about this...
The Bad News
This ended up being a larger challenge than I anticipated. This challenge means that I had to give up on some things I wanted to bring over from the old gallery to the new one... Here are some of the problems I encountered
- The "old" TamaTalk gallery used a gallery that has not been updated in ages so it does not work with our new software (it barely worked with the old software!). I was not able to import much of anything from the old gallery to the new.
- I had to manually import every image from the old gallery. I was not able to automatically import who uploaded every image. What I had to do is rename the original image files to say who originally uploaded it. If you look at old images you will see that the name is something like image-name-by-member-name.jpg. This means that if you uploaded an image your member name is listed with the image. Unfortunately it does not automatically link to your TamaTalk member name and so it will not be reflected in your profile or anything. This was the only way I was able to get things working unfortunately.
- I created a new member called Gallery Import to bring in all these old gallery images. If the gallery says the image is by Gallery Import then you know it is an image that was imported in from the old gallery.
- Unfortunately, I was also unable to import ANY comments left on the old gallery. I am so sorry.
I am sincerely sorry for these kinds of problems in getting the old stuff into the new. I struggled to work my admin-fu on this problem but kept hitting walls in geting everything moved over. In the end I had to simplify my plans in order to just get the gallery opened again.
The Good News
- The new gallery is FAR better than the old system.
- My hope is that, since we are using the "official" gallery product from the Invision Power Board people, we will never have to deal with these kinds of import problems again. Even better is they are making really nice features that mix in perfectly with the rest of the site.
I am still working out some of the kinks but I think it is ready enough to open the doors and let everyone in. Expect to see some menus not showing up right and some images not showing up right yet... I am working on these problems! I would love to hear your thoughts (and problems) that you have.
[you can also get to the gallery from the More menu at the top of the page)
