Piwigo plugins and themes access

dsnpevl wrote:
Both "Piwigo" and "Koken" look promising at first glance and seem to have active development ongoing.

Did some testing with ReadyNAS Photo II, Piwigo and Koken on RN516. All have pros and cons. Here are some of my experiences as a first-time user:

ReadyNAS Photo II (http://www.readynas.com/?p=5370)

pros

• Good interface for the slideshow and to flip through the album.

cons

• Further development seems to have stopped (https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75243#p418797).


• https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75243


• https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75244


• https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75154


• https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75145


• https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75127


• https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=75083

Piwigo (piwigo.org)

Build from photographer's perspective with the goal to automate Photo Albums.

pros

• Easy to setup


• Comes with a set of build-in themes

cons

• Needed to tweak some php.ini values on RN516.


• Some people (as do I) experience problems with "Connection to server unavailable" (https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=72962). This prevents me from downloading new themes.

Koken (koken.me)

Build as Content Management System (CMS) with creative website publishing in mind.

pros

• Good CMS, once you get to grips with the Admin pages and the concepts of themes, albums, essays, collections, etc. See the demo site at demo.koken.me.

cons

• Needed to tweak some php.ini values on RN516.


• No default themes available in setup on RN516. Confusing for first time users, who think something is wrong.


• Runs extremely slow on RN516 (see fotografeer.nl) and is therefore not really usable for creating/hosting a website on RN516. (Not sure if the CPU/memory is the bottleneck, or PHP settings/limitations.)

Update 2014-09-29: After upgrades of network router firmware, increased down-/upload speed by my provider, a few RN516 firmware upgrades, loading reduced size photo's (instead of the full 12Mbit pictures direct from the camera) and upgrading Koken to Version 0.18.2, the situation has improved dramatically. Themes can now be installed directly from the store. The site builds up much faster. And the Koken web interface speed is also much better now. All-in-all the usability for me has reached a point where I am using Koken as the primary tool for my web-site. See fotografeer.nl.