Ever since version 2.0, Les Pas has been able to share albums with other Nextcloud users, you can even co-edit the same album with others if you publish the album as 'Joint Album'. But how about people not in your Nextcloud server, like those friends who attended your wedding? Create temporary guest accounts for them is just not feasible. Photo blog is here to help! And luckily, we have Pico, the stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS, which happens to have a very good Nextcloud [app]((https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/cms_pico), enable us to publish our own blogs.

Les Pas make very good use of this integration, and provides you with three choices of blog post templates in it's first release, Cascade, Magazine and Timeline.

Cascade is the simplest one, presenting your album in a two-columns list of photos. It's a good fit if you don't care much about annotating each one of them. On the contrary, Magazine is your choice when you have a lot to say. And Timeline, as the name says, is great for presenting your work in a time-base manner, like your kid's childhood photos, or an album documenting an event.

To start blogging, you may begin with adding captions to your photos. Then from the new 'Manage Blog' menu, you can launch the 'Blogging Dialog' as you see above, in that dialog window, choose the blog theme you like and select which photos to included in the blog. When all are set, hit the 'Post' button. Changes you done to your photos later, like caption modification, photo editing, will be published to the blog automatically. You only need to post the blog again if you would like to change the blog theme or photos set. P.S. Pico CMS support HTML tags in the caption too.

Nextcloud protects your files with strong authentication. To allow the general public viewing your blog, Les Pas will create a low resolution version of your selected photos and copy them to Pico CMS's storage space. If your works are videos or animated GIF/WebP etc, there is no way to do the compression, instead, the original files are copied. Mind that, at the current stage, Pico CMS doesn't provide any way to authenticate visitor, so your works are freely downloadable by the general public.

Due to security reason, Pico CMS team won't provide API for non-admin user to install new theme, you have to do it manually.

Installation

1. Install Pico CMS
2. Login to your Nextcloud instance, you need root privilege
   • Download the pico_lespas folder from this repo
   • Copy folder pico_lespas to /<your Nextcloud data folder>/appdata_xxxxxxxxx/cms_pico/themes. Don't change the name pico_lespas, or things will break. The folder content of .../cms_pico/themes/pico_lespas/ should look like the following afterward

     css/
     fonts/
     images/
     index.twig
     js/
     sass/
     single.twig
     

   • Change the ownership of the created folder and all the files beneath it to www-data.www-data by chown -R www-data.www-data /<your Nextcloud data folder>/appdata_xxxxxxxxx/cms_pico/themes/pico_lespas/
3. Visit your Nexcloud page in the browser, logon as Nextcloud admin, go to Pico CMS setting, be aware that there are two Pico CMS items in the setting screen, make sure you select the one in 'Administration' section
4. Scroll to Custom themes section, you will see pico_lespas in the theme list now, if not, hit the refresh button. Click the '+' button to add pico_lespas theme
5. Done! You can now go back to Les Pas app and start blogging.
6. You should go through all the instructions on Pico's console page too, there are some other configurations you might like to take care, like the website short URL etc. If you do follow the website short URL instruction and you are using Apache, please make sure you enable proxy and proxy_http modules too, or web server will throw 500 error.
7. As Les Pas store all pico related files in a hidden folder in Les Pas's home folder, if you are using Apache as your web server, make sure file access to hidden folder is allowed. Refer to this issue for detail instruction.