Yesterday Google published the list of students accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) – 2007. Coppermine has been allocated four students which is not bad considering just the first year in GSoC.
The major we are looking for from this project is the strong API for Coppermine. The stronger API will attract more developers from different platforms to contribute.
Then there is a Java based desktop client which will be utilizing the new API to give more powerful tool to users for uploading images to their websites. The client is expected to perform all the CPU eating processes on the client itself.
Next to follow are some of the features to be added to Coppermine’s core.
More details on each project can be found here.
Finally, I congraduate all the students who has been selected for Coppermine GSoC-2007 and wish them all the very best for their projects.
To those who had applied but were not selected, not to worry, we will be back with more projects next year.
Wow! We really got good response for Coppermine in GSoc, 07. As many as 35 applications are submitted by the students across the world starting from novice Coppermine users wanting to explore the world of open source to the expert programmers who have hacked into coppermine’s code to make it more feature rich. These guys (and ofcourse gals) are ready to build API’s, desktop clients and many more to make coppermine the best photo gallery software.
We are now looking forward to the next step, i.e. finallizing the student applications so that we can make the best out of their skills.
Happy Coppermining!
Coppermine Photo Gallery has been accepted in this years Google Summer of Code (GSoc) as a mentor organization. This is for the first time since GSoc has started back in 2005.
Visit Coppermine on GSoc here
We have also published the list of idea’s that we would like to be implemented by the students. If you have seen coppermine in past and interested in improving it, apply via GSoc web app. The instructions for the same can be found here
Google will give USD 4500 to the students successfully completing the task.
For more information feel free to contact me at aditya@adityamooley.net
From past one month or so I was desperately looking for something which will allow me to open multiple Firefox instances with different profiles. At first it looks like an easy task to accomplish but at the end leaves you with scratching your head.
Some of you may think that its as simple as writing a command
firefox -ProfileManager
at that’s it.
But no, this won’t work. Even if you create multiple profiles and try to open it through profilemanager it will still load firefox with same profile.
To open Firefox with another profile you should use the command
./firefox -no-remote -P profile2
But remember that your first Firefox instance must be opened without using the -no-remote option. Only then you can open multiple Firefox with different profile.
I hope this will make the life easy for lot of developers using Firefox
Site navigation with keyboard has got much popularity within web uses since the time Google has introduced this feature in its most famous application GMail. Some of the other web applications where this type of navigation can be used for better user experience are photo gallery and photo blog.
To make this possible, HTML provides us an attribute accesskey which can be assigned to the navigation links on these type of sites. But the major drawback of this is, user has to press a combination of ALT+accesskey or ALT+SHIFT+accesskey to make this work, which is a bit tedious work.
So, I thought of making this work more easily by using the same accesskey attribute. For this, I used the excellent Javascript library JQuery and developed a completely unobtrusive plugin to make these long accesskeys short. Thus the name shortaccesskey.
This plugin, when used along with jquery will allow you to use the accesskeys defined on the page by just typing that key only. So, ALT+j becomes j and ALT+k becomes k making navigation easier.
Also, if you have any form elements in your page, then these shortaccesskey’s will automatically disable itself as you start typing in the form elements like textbox or textarea. When you come out of the form element it will be enabled again.
Demo:
Click here for demo.
Access keys available:
k -> next photo
j -> previous photo
u -> album view
h-> home
Download:
jquery.shortaccesskey.js
Installation:
- Download and save the plugin js file somewhere in your site’s webroot, preferably in the folder where you have kept the jquery.js file.
- Include this plugin file along with jquery (if not already included) in the template file. Remember, plugin file must be included after the jquery file.
- Just below that write the following code in javascript block to initialize the plugin
$(document).ready(function() {
$.shortaccesskey.init();
});
And you are done. All the accesskeys on you page will now be accessible with shortaccesskeys.
If you have any questions or suggestions do add a comment here.
We knew that just creating the API won’t any good to Coppermine. So the next bigger task in hand was to create a client using that API to show the world that what we have made is gold. Since we use Linux at our workplace and I always use the latest Fedora Core (5 at the time of writting this) we decided to build a KDE Client.
Choosing a name was not so difficult. Most or every KDE application starts with K and we had a direct choice of replacing C with K and that was the birth of Koppermine.
The biggest challenge for me was to learn KDE programming. At the time of starting we just knew that there is something called as KDevelelop which we can use to build application and QT-Designer to design the forms. We are very thankful to the KDE-India list who helped us a lot and answered my newbie questions with patience.
While writting this Koppermine is stable and enjoying its release 1.1
Now a days API’s and tools based on those either web based or desktop are getting more and more famous. We all have witnessed a great API library by Flickr and some cool tools made in Flash using that API.
There are also tools for uploading photos to your Flick account like kflickr.
Being the part of Coppmermine Photo Gallery, one of the biggest Opensource photo gallery software in PHP, a thought clicked in our mind to have a API which will attract more developers than just the end users. And we started implementing the idea immediately.
We decided to follow the footsteps of flickr API to implement the calls and the responses. Today we are ready with the Coppermine API although with just two calls one for uploading the photos and the other for the list of categories and albums in the given Coppermine install.
The API is available in the devel module of newly created SVN repository of Coppermine on Sourceforge. Being the site owner you just need to get the API and put it in your gallery’s root folder.
I have already created an upload tool for Coppermine using this API and currently it is hosted as a independent project on SF. Its name is Koppermine.
Yes, you are right. The K is for KDE. Koppermine requires KDE to run. Window$ users!!! If you are a serious Coppermine user then you can think of migrating to Linux 
Koppermine allows you to a lot more than just uploading.
I will write more about API with possibly some example usage and Koppermine in other posts.
So, keep watching
