Monthly Archives: September 2009

WordPress and Gallery Integration

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Last week I posted a brief piece in the WordPress Ideas Forum.  To sum it up, I proposed for WordPress to use another open source project (Gallery) for its media integration.  I’ve previously written about the Gallery project.  A major focus of WordPress’ upcoming version (2.9) is media integration, including photos and videos.  Many in the community are worried that WordPress is starting to get much too large of a package (bloat).

There is already another community built on photos and videos on the web, and I think WordPress would be better off to work with the Gallery community than to build media uploading and gallery capabilities into a blogging project.

My entire idea is:

I propose for WordPress to operate/integrate better with the Gallery project:

http://gallery.menalto.com/

I believe the next version of WordPress will have lots of new features related to media, editing pictures, and things of that nature. Many (including myself) view that as bloat. Instead of building these features in, why not support another open source project like Gallery which has many of the needed features already in a project dedicated to photos/media.

Either in the core or in an included plugin, allow for posting of an entire photoalbum in Gallery into a WordPress post (in the same fashion that Ma.tt currently has album-type posts) and allow people to connect their WordPress installation with a Gallery installation.

By doing this, WordPress users would get better photo/media integration through a dedicated project (Gallery), the size of the WordPress package would remain small (for anti-bloaters,myself included), and WordPress would support the Gallery open source project (I’m sure WordPress developers would work more with Gallery if there is integration and bring some improvements).

I would really like to hear feedback on this idea.

Gallery3 is still in beta, and the API isn’t documented very well, but I think an infusion of developer support from a project like WordPress could easily conquer this problem.  Even with the lack of API documentation, I am already looking to integrate WordPress and Gallery.

KU Alum is City Manager for New City in India

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A post on LinkedIn from a friend directed me to a news article about a new “hill station” (or city) in India that is being built from scratch.  There are several quotes from Lavasa’s city manager, Scot Wrighton.  Scot is a University of Kansas MPA program alum (a KUCIMAT) who previously worked at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute.  As one of the KUCIMATs in Georgia, Scot interviewed me during my application process for the University of Kansas.  The Carl Vinson Institute has a small piece about one of Scot’s visits to India earlier this year.  Way to go, Scot!

Georgia Contingent in ICMA Fellowship

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The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) released the list of participants in ICMA’s Local Government Management Fellowship program.

Fellows must be recently graduated from an MPA program.  The Fellows acquire a position with an affiliated local government to work and get a real world introduction to local government management.  Just like my MPA program at the University of Kansas.

The University of Georgia has one participant in the Fellowship (KU has none, which isn’t surprising because of its own internship program).  5 Fellows (of 13) were placed with Georgia local governments.  I’m proud that my home state is taking so many of these local government students; this bodes well for management and government in Georgia.

And, the Fellowship program even has a blog.