Not long ago I was bored – I was thinking about something to code. I had a talk about a fotoalbum with my girlfriend – written in PHP(PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) -, so we could share some fotos. There are a lot of them out there, sure, but they all had some limitations, bad layout, etc. that made us think about it. Even the gallery I use right now is not what I really wanted to have. So I build my own.
### Templates ###
The main goal was to use templates. Templates are kind of easy: you can imagine it as a simple html-page with a template language where you need it (like when you want to have a variable title or you want to iterate through guestbook entries). I like templates, I often work with them and I really think you should use them wherever you can. So let’s use templates.
#### Mambo, HTML and CSS ####
Another thing that came to my mind was using it with [Mambo](http://www.mamboserver.com/). This is not as easy as I thought because with Mambo you can’t use your own stylesheet and have correct html code. And I wanted it to validate as strict HTML 4.01. With [Cascading Style Sheets](http://www.w3c.org/Style/CSS). Which should also validate. This is a problem not solved so far (except when using the Mambo wrapper).
### Sessions and Databases ###
Using sessions and a database today is kind of “state of the art”. I wouldn’t want to work without these nowadays, these mechanisms are really handy and make a programmers live easier.
### Tables or divs? ###
When I came to designing I thought about a layout for displaying thumbnails – how much columns, should I use slow tables or fast divs? It uses divs, as you might have thought. But – which is really great I believe – it has no fixed columns. This means if you resize your browser window the thumbnails wrap to fit width. That way you – as the user – can control how much images you want to be displayed on screen. No more large white space between images – no more expanding websites where you have to scroll vertically (though there are mice out there that are able to do that). Isn’t that great?
### View fotoalbum ###
I hope you got curious 🙂 If so, then visit my beta version of fotoalbum. Tell me if you like it through the contact form in the menu or download fotoalbum to test it on your own. Have fun!
René's Blog 