Jan Pavelka and Kristof De Jaeger both saw PicLens and immediately thought the same thing: this was something that should be on every website. So they each set about creating quick and effective ways for website developers to enable PicLens on their pages. Their plugins for the powerful open source content management systems Joomla! and Drupal allow users of both platforms to easily integrate PicLens support.
Jan and Kristoff’s modules join a growing number of ways for developers to incorporate PicLens support. PicLens Publisher and PicLens Plugin for WordPress can both be found here, along with our Webmaster’s Guide, and the Freewebs publishing platform is another easy way of building PicLens galleries into your site.
As a website enthusiast, Jan Pavelka wanted an easy way to create picture galleries in Joomla! 1.5, but couldn’t find anything that met his needs. So he went about creating Phoca Gallery, which allowed him and other Joomla! developers to build and manage image galleries.
Not long after Phoca Gallery launched, a user approached Jan and “asked me if Phoca Gallery supported PicLens. He gave me the link and immediately I saw its potential and created PicLens support. Now in addition to the initial Phoca Gallery options, users can employ the PicLens slideshow to get everything at once “ the detail view, slideshow, 3D wall, et cetera.” Jan encourages website developers to check out Joomla! and Phoca Gallery for sharing their own media content. For more information about Phoca Gallery, check out the user manual.
Kristof De Jaeger first used Drupal three years ago for a small project, but it has since become the only CMS he uses for his work: “The great power of Drupal is that it’s very easily extensible with dozens of contributed modules which all use the core Drupal API. It makes life for developers very easy. The fact that it’s free and has such a great community behind it cuts down on your developing time.”
So why did Kristof become interested in building a PicLens module for Drupal? “I first saw PicLens during DrupalCon Boston, in March 2008. During the closing session, they showed pictures of the convention on a big screen using the PicLens Firefox plugin. One month later, I saw it again at work and immediately fell in love with it, because it is so damn cool! I came home that evening and put together my first Drupal PicLens module code on cvs a few hours later.”
Seeing the MediaRSS feed employed by PicLens excited Kristoff. “One thing I would really like to see is that MediaRSS feeds become supported in the Drupal Core. I’m going to follow the Drupal 7 development cycle closely and continue to review, test, and write more core and contributing patches.”
Kristoff’s PicLens module is supported in Drupal 5 and 6, and also comes with its own MediaRSS API, so that if someone is writing their own Drupal module, they can use the PicLens module’s functions to generate an independent MediaRSS feed. He’s used it to design the galleries on his own site “ you can see an example here “ and encourages everyone to try it out!
