Hmmm. I've been working on this site until 2:00 and 3:00 AM most nights for the last couple of weeks that I guess I'm still too tired to write about it. I'll mention some overview points for now and provide specifics later as they come up.
First of all, its been a real pleasure [virtually] working with Jason Alexander, Scott Watermasysk, and the guys behind DotNetNuke. I've been tying nGallery, .Text, and DotNetNuke together at a high level for now, basically to share DotNetNuke style guides, identity and roles with nGallery and .Text, and to do that I had to dig into the source and, in a way, the minds of how these guys think and write code. And such excellent code it is! These guys are so damned good! Its wild to think of these guys working together at Telligent along with Rob Howard.
The three applications look like a unified website, which was my goal before release. They share DotNetNuke identity and roles where necessary, but there is more to do and more fun to be had digging into the source.
Top goals in continued integration of the three apps are:
- Add security levels to nGallery. You can set a site password, but this isn't good enough. I want to add photos to an album and tag some of them as “private,“ then use the passed DotNetNuke roles to determine access. I was close to making this happen, but the extensive use of Server Caching in nGallery put the brakes on making this happen for the initial site release. Maybe I'll investigate changing the caching to HttpContext...
- Integrate nGallery and DotText to quickly announce a new album, or describe a series of photos uploaded as part of an existing album. I'll probably implement .Text post templates to support tying a blog post with nGallery albums and photos.
Those are about it, but they're require some effort. As I said, I had a kick working with these great application code bases and look forward to the opportunity for more latenight fun.