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The latest version, which is greatly improved is here, Version 2.1 GAdmin


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About Gadmin.

Gadmin is a free Web/PERL-based gallery administration utility.


Gadmin is customizable, there are NO links back to my page.
NO popups, no tricks, nothing is for sale or tainted with ads or redirections of any kind.


Gadmin allows you to:



Gadmin does not resize the images. You are responsible for staging pairs of pictures in the
/addpics directory :
The recommended size for the larger picture is 800 pixels wide
The recommended size for the smaller picture (the Thumbnail) is 70 pixels wide
I use free JPEG resizer to resize the images.

The thumbnails need to be named <filename>_th.jpg
For example, if the larger picture is pic1.jpg, then
the thumbnail needs to be named pic1_th.jpg.

As far as renaming the files, I used ThRename.pl on my local PC.
The file is included in the package without comment at this time.




There are a couple of ways to utilize Gadmin:

1 ) Gadmin was originally designed to be used on the web server that will host the web pages.
For this method, you must have sufficient priveliges on the host. The scripts and prerequisite files
will be uploaded to the server, then the Administration utility must be able to create, modify, rename, and delete files.
Most free hosts such as Tripod do not offer sufficient privileges on their servers.
My web site is hosted by Netfirms for 5 dollars/month ($60/year)
and the scripts work fine there.

2) If your web host does not offer enough control, there is another way.
It is free, and not very difficult to install PERL and
Apache web server on your own computer.
Then you can utilize your own little localized web server to generate the Galleries
and then upload them to your site.
. During development and testing I got tired of dealing with the long-distance process of
modifying, uploading and testing, over and over again, so I eventually installed
PERL and Apache on my Linux workstation and then later on my Windows 2000 workstation to do the work.

Gadmin was designed to generate picture galleries that look the way you specify.
There are things you can control and things you can not.
What you can control:

What you can not (easily) control:

You should not manually alter the generated pages in any way because the PERL scripts depend on the properties
the pages were generated with. For example, if you use an HTML design program like free Arachnophilia and select "Beautify HTML" the code may be easier for
you to read but will no longer be compatible with the Gadmin scripts

Installing.

I recommend that you print this page first.
Then, download version 1.0, NOT the latest version v1Gadmin.zip . This is a windows zip file
(A Unix/Linux tar file is coming soon...)
Unzip the files to a temporary location, then modify the files and relocate the directories as described below.

File modification.

The zip file extracts a
"cgi-bin" directory which has all the PERL (.pl) scripts, and a
"www" directory.
The "www" directory has an "addpics" directory with some sample images
and a "Galleries" directory with all the required files

The file "Gcommonfunctions.pl" may need to be modified with the path information for your site.

It is configured for the most common scenario, but this information can vary from site to site.
There are only a few variables that may need modification, which will now be discussed.

I have tried to place the variables that may need modification as close to the top of the file as possible.
(All variables in PERL start with a dollar sign $)

1) First, around line 14 you will find a $galdir variable.
This is the name of the directory, that is right under your main web directory, that holds all the Gallery Pages and pictures
Modification of this variable points Gadmin to whatever 'set of galleries' to operate on.
This variable should not need to be modified for initial use, but it is handy for testing
changes on set of galleries, then change the variable back to operate on the real galleries.

2) Next around line 16 is the self explanitory $webmaster variable.
Put you email address here, the backslask \ in front of the @ sign is required PERL syntax.

3) Next around line 36 the $cgibin directory is the path to cgi-bin from an HTML coding perspective.
In most cases the default value of "/cgi-bin" is the correct value.

4) Finally around line 42 is an $htmlroot variable.
This is the path to your main html directory from the cgi-bin directory.
The default of "../www" is correct for the most common situation where
your cgi-bin and your html directory are 'siblings' of each other.
In other words they appear site by side in an FTP directory listing.
If, at your site, the cgi-bin directory is actually located under your html (www) directory,
then you would probably change the value to "../"

That is all that should be required to be changed in Gcommonfunctions.pl

The .html pages should not need any modifications.
While they are designed for you to customize, you should definitely verify that the scripts are
working on your system before you customize the .html pages.
That being said, here is a discussion of each of the .html pages and thier functions:

1) index.html - This file is the main portal for your galleries.
It can be whatever you want, just don't modify the line on the bottom with closing BODY tag,
because the scripts place the thumbnails (small icon images) based on that line.

2) NewPicTop.html - This is the template that gets used to make the top of all new pages
The BODY line is used by the script to make the Administration pages.
If you decide to use a background image instead of a color value as the default file does,
please use the same ../ notation to refer to the image and place the image in the $galdir
directory and it's parent directory.

3) NewPicBottom.html is used to generate the bottom portion of each page verbatum.

Next.gif and prev.gif are the images for the previous and next links.
You could substitute your own .gifs here but the file names must be the same.




All the .html pages just discussed and the two .gifs need to be in the directory,
directly under your main html (www) directory (Usually the one with your index page), that you specified as $galdir in the .pl file

File placement.

The scripts expect each required file to be in a particular place
All (pairs of) pictures are required to be in the addpics directory,
which should be in the "home page" directory. All the .pl files should be in your cgi-bin directory.

The Galleries directory, or whatever directory name you used for $galdir
needs to be in the "home page" directory. This makes the gallery and the addpics
directory 'siblings'.

The Galleries ($galdir) directory needs to have the following files:

Using Gadmin.

Point your browser to http://yoursite.yourdomain/cgi-bin/GAdmin.pl
The buttons on this page lead you to the other .pl files depending on
the operation being performed.

Revision History.

At some time there was a problem with moving pics with a number larger than "10". This was because I was using "String" comparison operators, e.g. "gt" instead of number operators, e.g. ">", in GCommonfunctions.pl.
This was fixed in early 2003.

In July 2003, I changed the link to the Galleries to open in a new window, named $galroot, in GCommonfunctions, around line 1735. This should make it more convenient to modify and view the galleries. (You still have to hit "refresh" if you have recently changed the page in question. For example, if you change the order of the pics, and the links do not seem to match the listing on the left, do a refresh of that page and the links should now bw correct. This just has to do with the caching of the web pages, which I do not want to override to keep the experience as fast as possible for the people who are doing the viewing of the pages.

Troubleshooting.

It may be a bad choice but as you can see, I use a background image and white text.
The downside of this is that if the background image can not be found, then
the white text is displayed on the white screen and the effect is you see a white screen.

Other possible issues are:

The perl scripts all expect perl to be in "/usr/sbin" if this is not the correct location, then it needs to be placed there or the one line up top of the scripts needs to be modified to specify the correct path to PERL.

The .pl files, like the .html files are ASCII files and need to be FTP'd in ASCII mode, not binary mode.

File permissions. Particularly, the $galroot (Galleries) directory needs to be opened up.

Around line 2 of each of the .pl files is
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
this is there to make any error messages display to the screen instead of (in addition to ?)the error log. 'They' say to keep it commented, but I have left it uncommented, because if your system supports it, it may be the only way for you to figure out what may be wrong.
But if the scripts do not work at all, you might try commenting the line out of the .pl files to see if that helps.

I realize that GadminHelp.html (The page that comes up when you press "Help" in Gadmin)
will not apply exactly to anyone but me. It is the how-to do it for my situation.
I left it as it was so you can see one way of preparing and sending the files.
If you get around to it, you might want to change it to reflect the way YOU
prepare your files.

All the files (not directories) in the "www" directory are there to support the 'documentation'
i.e. FreeGalleryAdmin.html, which is the page you are reading,
GadminHelp.html which shows a way to prepare the images,
all required image files for those two files,
and index.html which just has a couple sample links.

PLEASE let me know if you had problems, or success, or if you had to do anything else to make the scripts work for you.

Feedback.

Use the following field to send feedback/comments/questions aboutGadmin:

Email:



Email: james_moody@yahoo.com