Herself’s Webtools

I’ve been using Coppermine about 3 months now. While it has some shortcomings I’m mostly pleased with it. There are hundreds of templates available for Coppermine, but most of them seem to be written for young men. I needed something a bit cleaner, brighter and that would blend in with my blogs.

Then I ran across and excellent tutorial by Gizmo about Converting a Wordpress theme to a Coppermine theme. A couple of hours later I had a Cutline theme for Coppermine. Several more hours later I had worked out the bugs and polished it a bit.

You can see it On my personal blog photo section.

Read the readme file first and customize the theme for your website. Then just upload it to your Coppermine/themes directory. Go into your admin menu and to themes and change the theme.
Cutline Theme for Coppermine

I decided it was silly to be sending my users to Flickr to view my photos instead of hosting them on my own server. So I played with various photo gallery tools over the weekend. I decided on Coppermine because it was the only gallery I tried that set itself up with out a battle and everything worked from the start.

You’ll need php and mysql on your server.

Right now I have it up on TimesToCome my personal site, my Garden and House plant sites.

Coppermine comes with several themes, I found them easy to customize. There is only one css and one html page to deal with. You can also easily customize the number of images shown and a billion other details in the administration panel. You can allow people to join, upload photos, send ecards of your photos or not. Everything is customizable. So much so that you could get lost and spend weeks tweaking the software.Coppermine is both free and open source.

Coppermine’s biggest flaw is that it sorts and stores photos by position, not name or id, so it is not search engine friendly nor is it easy for you to link to specific photos.

PHP code to display a Coppermine photo badge in a webpage

WP Plugin to display a recent photo badge from your Coppermine gallery

* Note: Coppermine table names changed in 1.4, so download the proper version for the Coppermine you are running on your website.

Download for Coppermine Widget for Coppermine

This widget creates a Flickr like badge from your Coppermine Gallery. ( See my personal blog bottom right sidebar for a demonstration. )

1 ) First edit the wp_coppermine.php file. You need to enter the hostname, login, database name, and password for the Coppermine database.

If you do not know this information then ftp to your website, cd into your coppermine directory, cd to the includes directory and download config.inc.php. All this information is in there.

Then if your Coppermine is not installed in /coppermine change this to be what ever directory you installed Coppermine into. Lastly enter the url of your website.

2 ) Upload the coppermine_badge folder to your plugin/widgets directory ** widgets MUST be in this directory to work **

3 ) Activate the plugin

4 ) Go to Presentation->Widgets and add the widget to your sidebar and set your preferences.

Coppermine WP Plugin

This plugin creates a Flickr like badge from your Coppermine Gallery. ( See my personal blog bottom right sidebar for a demonstration. )

1 ) First edit the wp_coppermine.php file. You need to enter the hostname, login, database name, and password for the Coppermine database.

If you do not know this information then ftp to your website, cd into your coppermine directory, cd to the includes directory and download config.inc.php. All this information is in there.

Then if your Coppermine is not installed in /coppermine change this to be what ever directory you installed Coppermine into. Lastly enter the url of your website.

2 ) Upload the coppermine_badge folder to your plugin directory

3 ) Activate the plugin

4 ) In your side bar enter: <?php echo coppermine_gallery() ?>

OR

4 ) Enter : <– copperminegallery –> in your template or in the code section of a post or page.

It is set up to display 5 thumbnails vertically. To change the number of images change the number at the end of this line:

$query = “select filepath, filename, ctime from cpg_pictures order by ctime desc limit 5;”;

If you want a horizontal list remove the

<br> from this line:
echo “\n<br><img src=\”$url/$directory/albums/$path” . “thumb_$name\”>”;

(Widget version of Coppermine Badge)