How to integrate Qdig with WordPress

I’ve been meaning to document the changes I made to allow the Qdig photo gallery and WP-Qdig plugin integrate nicely into the Kubrick WordPress theme. You can see what it looks like by going to the demo site: Qdig integrated with WordPress. It really is nicely integrated, allowing comments for the post and navigation through the images.

First of all I’ll say thanks again to David B. Nagle for the QDIG-WP Plugin and his excellent forums and Hagan Fox for Qdig itself.

Secondly, I want to indulge in a short rant. I love WordPress, but why was this process even necessary? Why aren’t photo galleries part of the basic functionality of WordPress? Searching the official support forums shows that I am not the only one that wanted this functionality. Countless hours have been spent by WordPress users to try to merge different photo gallery scripts into WordPress and usually without much success. I myself have tried over a dozen, and so was overjoyed to find one that did the job with some minor tweaking. Actually there was another candidate, Alex King’s WP Photos which is unfortunately unsupported. I couldn’t get it work, even when using the pre-modified packaged WP available on the site.

Some replies to the call for photo gallery functionality were along the lines of WordPress is not for photo-blogging, use a photo-blogging program instead. To which I feel like blowing a big raspberry. It isn’t as if blogging software never evolves. WordPress didn’t have basic CMS functionality and now it does. I know that there are many people who are like me, who have a blog and also photo galleries on their site. Combining them makes life simpler (one set of comments, one database to back-up, no need for visitors to jump back and forth between two separate parts of the site etc).

Anyway, that’s almost the end of my rant. If you agree with what I said and like the way Qdig integrates with WordPress, leave a comment or better yet blog about or del.icio.us this post

Onto the gritty details. There are some good instructions on David’s site that will get you most of the way there. Go to the site and carry out the installation instructions. You just need to change a few more things in the Qdig index.php file. The extra changes will generate thumbnails and resized versions in batches, let you display photos without having them jut out, will let you have a thumbnail bar and let your users click on the smallish photo to see the original full sized file.

I’ll just list the changes I made to the stock Qdig index.php if the line numbers have changed, just do a search for the variable names. Most of the changes are flipping TRUE to FALSE or vice versa.

line 99: $header['force_disa'] = TRUE; // Force HTML headers to be suppressed.
line 105: $dir_nav['enable'] = FALSE; // Enable Directory Navigation. If disabled,
line 126: $ctrl_bar['enable'] = FALSE; // Enable control bar.
line 149:$thmb_row['maxwidth'] = 550; // Approx. max. width of thumbnails row
line 198: $img_link['full'] = TRUE; // If the image is a resized version, link to the
line 200: $img_link['file'] = TRUE; // Full size link goes directly to the image file.
line 209: $lwr_nav['full_link'] = FALSE; // Show `Full Size' link if image is resized.
line 320: $cnvrt_thmb['size'] = 40; // Thunbnail image height in pixels.
line 328: $cnvrt_thmb['mesg_on'] = FALSE; // Produce a message when a thunbnail image
line 345: $cnvrt_alt['indiv'] = FALSE; // Convert alternates one-at-a-time rather than
line 347:$cnvrt_alt['mesg_on'] = FALSE; // Produce a message when an image is converted.
line 358:$cnvrt_size['1']['maxwid'] = 550;
line 529:$url_base_path = '/your path here (see David's instructions)/'; // Base URL path to the images (not the script)
line 531:$fs_base_path = 'your path here (see David's instructions)/'; // Filesystem path to the root dir of the gallery.
line 541:$keep_params = TRUE; // Keep extra GET parameters in the URLs.

Phew that’s almost it! To display the little thumbnail in your post follow the instructions in this thread on David’s site forums.

And one last tip, if nothing seems to happen or thumbnails aren’t being generated properly you need to add this line to your .htaccess file
php_value memory_limit 16M
This allocates more memory for the Qdig script to use. Some people said change it to 32M but for me 16M works fine and you really should use the lowest figure that works.

I hope this long post helps some people, and at the very least it will help me if I ever forget what I did

PS. Yes I know you can get loads of Flickr plugins, I use one myself, but I want to keep my photos on my site. Call me a control-freak if you want ;P