Abbas’ Blog

The other day i was chatting with my team mate Shk.Aziz Poonawalla and he inspired me to do a plugin for coppermine which should convert the uploaded documents (txt, pdf, doc, ppt etc..) to Scribd iPaper format and then display them using the Scribd document viewer.

So i went ahead and created such a plugin for coppermine. The plugin requires PHP 5 and CURL on the server and you should register an account on Scribd Platform to get an API key and secret phrase. After installing the plugin whenever a document is uploaded to cpg - it is copied (uploaded) to scribd server as well (behind the scenes). Scribd converts the document to iPaper format on its server and assigns a document id to it. Now when the document is viewed in cpg, we display the Scribd document viewer and supply it the document id. This displays the document in a nice flash viewer.

For further instructions and to download the plugin please see the forum thread.

The other day i had some free time and thought why not try my hand at converting a wordpress theme to coppermine one. I chose Fieldofsand which is a free wordpress them designed by Smarter Templates and started the conversion. Fortunately i did quite well and published the theme for coppermine community.

You may find quite a few HTML/CSS issues with the theme as i am primarily not a designer but developer. If you are a coppermine user then you might want to check the demo of the theme here. You can download the theme from sourceforge download page.

Coppermine Photo Gallery is again taking part as a mentoring organization in GSoC and i will be mentoring for coppermine organization for the second year straight in a row. It took us around a month to decide on project ideas and students.

Finally on April 21st 2008 the final student allocation list was published by google. I will be mentoring the project called AJAX functionality for core of Coppermine which will be done by Nuwan Sameera Hettiarachchi from Sri Lanka. After the completion of this project coppermine will be an Ajax rich application. Ofcourse every ajax functionality will gracefully degrade if javascript is not supported by the client browser. We intend to put following main features :

• Filmstrip carousel
• Ajax slideshow with transition effects
• New upload form to reduce the number of steps required to upload files
• Ajax sorting of pictures/albums/categories
• And many more cool small features…

The coding period will start on May 26th and will last till August 18th 2008. I am really looking forward for a great summer of code ahead and hope that coppermine interface gets better with student contributions.

Its been very long since i wrote last time and yes i know it is too late to mention this (as GSoC is over) but i was damn busy with work and other things.

Anyways the news is that Coppermine Photo Gallery was one of the open source projects which participated in Google Summer of Code 2007 (GSoC). Four students were chosen to work on different aspects (enhancements) of cpg. I was mentoring one of the students, Sander Weyens. Being a mentor was a wonderful first time experience. I really liked the work done by Sander and other students. Thu Tu did a wonderful job in coordinating the whole program for coppermine. She is in the dev team and was also a mentor.

Google is organizing a mentor summit in Mountain View, California on 6th Oct-07 and Coppermine has been invited. Any three mentors from coppermine can attend the summit and Google will be giving $1200 as travel expenses (for non U.S mentors). I am being told by other Dev Team members (specially Thu) to attend the summit but because of work load and visa problems i cannot. Though i would have loved to go there and represent coppermine. Better luck next time ;).

Coppermine’s development is done on sourceforge.net. Latest stable version of coppermine can be downloaded from the download page.

However there is no zip package available for Coppermine NG. You will need to check it out from the SVN repository. Coppermine NG is in early alpha stage and not meant for production servers. Currently only testers are using it. If you want to check out cpgNG and its cool features then follow the steps given below.

1. If you don’t have a SVN client then install it first. In most of the linux distros you get a command line utility.
2. Then issue svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/coppermine/trunk/cpgNGDevel /path/to/folder command.
3. Above command will checkout the cpgNG files in /path/to/folder directory. Change this path as per your needs.

Now follow the normal installation procedure of coppermine and you are done.

In the year 2004, I came across Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG) which is an open source project on sourceforge. Being developing PHP based applications i thought why not take a look at the source code of CPG. This was the first time ever when i came across an open source application (ofcourse apart from php). I found it very interesting and i started feeling strong penchant for coppermine. In the next few days i studied the CPG code and started contributing on the coppermine support forums.

Soon i found myself in the Development Team of coppermine. At that time cpg1.4 was in beta stage. Much of the work was already completed and i only got chance to fix few bugs. In year end of 2005 cpg1.4 was release as stable.

Classic coppermine had a self templating system and didn’t used a database abstraction layer. Much of the code is procedural programming based. We (Dr.Tarique Sani, Aditya Mooley and me) thought why not develop a next generation cpg where we will use oops based programming and smarty as templating system. So we started working on cpgNG (Coppermine Next Generation). cpgNG is written totally from scratch. cpgNG is now in alpha stage. To download and get more info on cpgNG go here. To download cpg go here.