Mostly Harmless

Alex Rabe’s gallery plugin for Wordpress “NextGEN Gallery” is becoming almost as popular as the integration with Gallery2 and with good reason. I run the gallery 2 integration on this blog and it means keeping both systems as well as the integration up to date. IF for whatever reason you want / need all the functionality of gallery2 this is great, but otherwise NextGEN Gallery which is still in beta (i.e. pre version 1) is quickly shaping up as a good alternative.

The best thing about WPMU (for those that don’t know) is that themes and plugins written for Wordpress often require little modification to function - so without further ado…

1. Set the default file path for the plugin so that all images are stored per blog. This function is run on activation when the tables for the plugin are created.

ngginstall.php

function ngg_default_options()

Add

global $blog_id;

Edit options line as follows

$ngg_options['gallerypath'] = “wp-content/blogs.dir/” . $blog_id . “/files/”; // set default path to the gallery

2. Remove ability for user to update the above in the blog backend

settings.php

Remove “gallerypath” from the list of fields submitted to the form - or remove the input box entirely.

3. Modify the version check

nggallery.php

Simply set if (version_compare($wp_version, ‘wordpress-mu-1.2.4′, ‘>=’)) or remove the check entirely

Note

Other changes are required

• If you want to take advantage of disk usage limits per blog and will depend on what method you are using to implement this (we’re using zspace upload quotas)

• You’ll probably also want to hide the plugin’s server status / news display.

• You may want to change / disable the “import image folder” function. Normally you won’t be allowing your users the upload access to need this function.

• The default path is displayed in various pages (such as where a gallery is created) in the backend, you may want to remove this as it probably will not be relevant for your users.

• You may need to edit / remove the permissions checking code depending on how your server is setup

• Kevin Element left a comment below to say  “I noticed that when you log in as a user and use the “Uninstall plugin tables” under “setup” it deactivates the plugin for all users.” so that is another feature you’ll wish to look at modifying. Thanks Kevin

Why are you not simply releasing a version of the plugin that works with MU?

Because “works” is relative to how you intend your MU site to function and what other custom code you have installed. The above hacks are the necessary to get the plugin to work on a default MU install. Alex is planning MU support for version one of the plugin - but how best to do this is debatable especially with the addition of things like a role manager and tagging system.

The current discussion on NGGallery for WPMU is here

Rowan :: Aug.24.2007 :: Quick Solutions, Wordpress MU :: 11 Comments »

Article on the BBC about search sites indexing information from social networking sites as well as the usual sources such as websites and newsgroups.

The interesting thing is that these sites don’t really change anything - yes they provide a “picture” of sorts of a person’s dalliances online that is accessible to the ordinary person but they don’t give you much more than a little fiddling with Google could have done.

In my case (and I have a pretty unique name) all you get is a rather fetching picture with a christmas hat from myspace that isn’t currently on this blog. So far so not very revenue generating for the site in question. A few scraped links to technical queries on online forums and mailing lists also aren’t very interesting to anyone, given that the email addresses and topics under discussion will be a few years old now.

What most people already knew to be true hasn’t changed - for piece of mind online just don’t use your real name. Given that I’ve got profiles across several social networking sites, this blog and quite a few domains in my name as well as profiles on numerous forums the level of information scraped by these sites is really pretty piss poor. Yes, these personal info aggregation sites do pose a major risk to those teens currently posting deeply personal stuff publicly over the web, but really that is the fault of the parents who let them have access to something unsupervised that they don’t really understand the implication of themselves.

If you do have a lot of information on a profile (such as facebook) including telephone numbers, address and birthday then that should really be a friends only page anyhow (don’t join a network) - unless you’re the type who writes your details in pub toilet stalls hoping for a “friend request”…

The sites also seem to suffer from the usual “common names” problem - they can tell me that Dan is a councillor in Eastbourne and was a governor at a local school but not one of them managed to link both of these pieces of information to the same name. One of the sites picks up my boss (who has a pretty unique name) but again simply by pulling a myspace entry which links you to one of the sites that she owns.

From the point of view of unique features, if the site is simply trawling other social networks and the web then it’s in danger of dying of irrelevance - myspace, facebook etc could easily partner with a search company if they wanted to trawl information from other sources for users to add to their profiles but most people don’t want that anyway - I have absolutely no interest in auto populating a profile of mine with out of date information or detail of online support requests to the MythTV project. Most people’s profiles are highly tweaked to a specific picture they want to provide at that moment.

I’m not saying that an upstart service couldn’t combine Google style search algorithm power and social networking into something massively wonderful / privacy threatening depending on your perspective but what I am saying is that the level of technical acumen and capital required to achieve such a thing makes it pretty unlikely. Pretty much the only thing these sites seem to do at the moment is provide an ever useful reminder to be careful what you attach your name to.

Rowan :: Aug.08.2007 :: Internet Anonymity, Personal Entries :: No Comments »