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Piwigo LDAP module blocks upgrade to 2.7 :-(

Today Piwigo 2.7 became available (for info on what’s new refer to their announcement). While upgrading I noticed that the Ldap Login module I depend on is not supported and according to this announcement on the Piwigo forums probably never will be.

I did try to perform the update and patch the LDAP Login plugin, but had to five that up after spending more than an hour on it as it turned out that something had changed in the way authentication is handled in Piwigo. Since I was running out of time I had to leave that for now as it turned out not to be a simple fix.

For me this is bad news as I am depending on LDAP integration so for now I cannot upgrade. Since the 2.7 version is still very fresh (i.e. only announced today) I will just defer the upgrade to see if there is any movement on this plugin. If not, I will have to look for another solution unfortunately….

Will document any alternative solution here as well once I find it to help others with a similar dependency.

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Clean Photo Album permalinks with Piwigo

I am playing for some time now with Piwigo to replace my Menalto Gallery3 online photo gallery. Key reason to look at another solution is that after the move from Gallery 2 to 3 the project (which took ages as it was a major overhaul of the code), the projects seems to have stalled.

So far I really like Piwigo as it has everything I need including iPhoto integration and a (simple) iPhone app. LDAP support is available through a plugin that is basic but suffices for my need. However, one of the key gaps for me was that it did not have any way to generate nice and simple URLs to albums that you can share easily (verbally). Although it was possible to define permalinks for an album, the URL remained ugly in my opinion.
Today I hacked a small patch together for the Piwigo 2.6 codebase that changes the URLs for photo albums to something like:

http://photo.mydomain.tld/albumname

which is exactly the way it worked for me fine (like I had with Gallery3). This only works for albums with a permalink defined, default album URL will retain the /category/<albumid> format, which is fine for my situation.

Steps to obtain more clean album URLs are:

  1. Apply this patch: piwigo-url-patch
  2. Add the following mod_rewrite rewriting rules to your Apache configuration
    RewriteRule ^/category/       /index.php/%{REQUEST_URI}               [L]
    RewriteRule ^/[^.]+$          /index.php/category/%{REQUEST_URI}      [L]

Again, in my setup this worked, I am still testing this so any feedback to improve is welcome. I did notice that occasionally the patch results in a / too many in URLs generated by piwigo, but that is silently ignored and does not affect the functionality.

To actually use the patch, define a permalink under [Administration] –> [Albums] –> [Manage] on the [Permalinks] tab.