Everyone,

The gallery on Gallery Of Lights is back up!

Everyone,

The gallery on Gallery Of Lights is back up!

Finally! What made it shut down?

Yay!

Finally! What made it shut down?

An issue that I don't know exactly what it was but Ian got it fixed.

Now we need to drive more activity to GoL. I know I plan on getting back on there myself. I will be posting pics however until I get my own house, cobrahead photos will likely be the same format they've been, laying on the ground or other surface until I buy a house and put poles up to take quality photos of fixtures installed and lit up.

Now we need to drive more activity to GoL. I know I plan on getting back on there myself. I will be posting pics however until I get my own house, cobrahead photos will likely be the same format they've been, laying on the ground or other surface until I buy a house and put poles up to take quality photos of fixtures installed and lit up.

Yes true. It seems like very few members are active there. No rush on the house thing, the market is crazy these days.

I truly figured it was done for...& wouldn't be back.
So that's good to hear (especially since I might be 'closing' my gallery here on LG. Even if I don't, no further uploads are planned, nor do I plan to be on here much anymore)

I have a few streetlight pic's that I've collected over the time it was down, I will probably eventually upload those...but...I think I'll finish backing up the data/comments on my pic's there first though.
(I'll be keeping my gallery there as primarily streetlights & HID. zero plans to duplicate the Fluorescent/Christmas lights galleries I have here)

I'd just rather be on GoL. It's more geared towards what I'm interested in which is street lights.

Glad to see it back up. Hopefully there will be a bit more activity but I fear the few months it was offline for meant a lot of people who still visited moved on.

Is anyone monitoring the bug report at the Gallery of Lights?  I have an issue at http://www.galleryoflights.org/mb/index.php?topic=1498.0

I believe Ian mentioned this when he upgraded the gallery. The old theme wasn't compatible with the new version of Copper mine and he had to revert to the basic theme which unfortunately doesn't have the link to the forum.

Does he needs to upgrade the Copper mine version on the forum side to make it work as well?

I think you might be a bit confused as to how the software on GoL works.

Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is the software that runs the forum side, that side was untouched and still has the original custom theme used on GoL. This was also why the forum worked during the period the gallery was down.

Coppermine is the software that runs the gallery. I believe either sometime got misconfigured or the host updated PHP to a version not supported by the old version of Coppermine si the gallery was down until Coppermine was updated to a newer version that supports the version of PHP used by the host. The updated version I believe dosen't support the old custom theme used by GoL and hence is using a rather basic generic theme right now.

Now SMF and Coppermine can be used as standalone pieces of software. You can have a site that uses only Coppermine or only SMF. And in addition I believe Coppermine can be paired with different forum software too like PhpBB or Vbulletin.

Now because the two parts of the site run on different pieces of software, there are some parts of the site that aren't that coherent. For example, searching the forum side won't search the text in gallery comments and searching the gallery won't yield any results in the forum. The same goes for user rankings that change when you make more posts in the forum. The ranking is only affected by forum posts so a user that makes a lot of posts in the gallery side still had the ranking of "newbie" on the forum side.

In order to make things slightly more convenient for the users, there are plugins available that allow Coppermine to allow users on the SMF side to seamlessly get credentials for the Coppermine side. SMF handles all the user registration and authentication, which is why all registration and logins are done on the SMF of things. This solves the user authentication part of things but for a more consistent user experience many will opt to have a custom SMF theme that includes links to the gallery and a custom Coppermine theme that includes links to the forum. It's this custom Coppermine theme that needs to be integrated to have the link to the forum back in.

Note that I believe LG runs or more or less the same SMF/Coppermine backend but LG's SMF/Coppermine integration is tighter than GoL's which is why LG has the gallary showing on the forum main page, the same theme so gallery comments look the same as forum posts, and the ability to have profile pictures and quotes in the gallery comment section. GoL's was less integrated so the site felt a bit more disjointed compared to LG.

Note that I believe LG runs or more or less the same SMF/Coppermine backend but LG's SMF/Coppermine integration is tighter than GoL's which is why LG has the gallary showing on the forum main page, the same theme so gallery comments look the same as forum posts, and the ability to have profile pictures and quotes in the gallery comment section. GoL's was less integrated so the site felt a bit more disjointed compared to LG.

There is a LOT of customisation on LG to get SMF and Coppermine to work together as well as they do. That is entirely due to Patrick's skill with coding; I know a little about the software, but I couldn't do half of what he's done with it.

The really fiddly bit comes with when someone wants to change username. It's easy enough to do it on SMF, but getting Coppermine to register the fact requires running a few SQL commands on the database, which is why we try not to encourage username changes too often 

I see what you means, Joe

Apparently, the Gallery side needs more work