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GitRay edited this page Mar 1, 2013 · 4 revisions

Pix2 is not a Gallery clone! Gallery is awesome, but it includes editing and administration features. I do not want those - they add security concerns and complexity that I'd rather not deal with.

I have been using the Yappa php-based photo album for years. It certainly gets the job done, but it (IMHO) is not particularly well-written and has some flaws that I would like to correct. I modified it over the years to support video playback and made other changes, but the original author hasn't updated it since 2002, I no longer mess with PHP as much as I used to, and well... I'm moving on.

Since my current language of choice is Python, I decided to seek out a photo album that is written in that language. Pix seemed to fit that bill, but it seems to be a dead project. There is another dead project, QuickyPix, that builds on Pix. IMHO, QuickyPix is written better, but adds too much complexity in the form of administration and editing features.

So I set out to resurrect Pix. So far I have improved the base Pix code a little to get it working out-of-the-box on my own Mac and on my own FreeBSD server, and with Apache's CGI support as well as the really-simple-to-debug-with "python -m CGIHTTPServer". I gave it a single configuration file instead of making you go into each class to search for global variables. I replaced delicate path juggling code with Python built-in os.path goodness. I fixed some potential security issues using system calls by switching to to the subprocess module. Now I will slowly bring over some of the better aspects of QuickyPix.

I have tagged the last version of Pix (v1.3.1) as well as my altered version of it (v1.4.0). I will keep a bug-fix version of the 1.4.x series going indefinitely. I decided to release a v1.5.0, for several reasons. One, no one seems to be using this :) Two, the original Pix was a bit of a mess... old-fashioned table-based layout, HTML did not validate, etc. v1.5.0 is the last cgi-only version and the last version that will not do videos. My current plan to bring over QuickyPix changes will result in a new 2.x series of tags. I haven't actually dipped into the QuickyPix bucket much... I seem to be taking my own path. Still, the 2.x series will start with WGSI support and then add video.

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Seriously, "python -m CGIHTTPServer" is just awesome. "cd" into your pix2 directory and type that and boom, instant CGI server on port 8000.

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