Battleangel | Personal

The Gallery2 install (latest stable build) over at Silent Nation just gave up some time last week. Maybe because of something that happened when phpsuexec was activated. No way to be sure really. Nothing I did though. The error was the infamous ERROR_PLATFORM_FAILURE and something about templates (I think). So, I proceeded to clean out the cache folders (and there are a lot of them) under g2data and eventually got rid of the error message, though of course my crude handling of the folders had inadvertently removed the thumbnails as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t manage to recreate the thumbnails for some reason BUT I did find (I’m sort of new with Gallery2) the database-only storage option (and page cache settings as well). The database setting seemed to do it and so the administration thumbnail rebuild function could do the rest. But it was a long time since any script did anything as remotely crazy as this. So far, Gallery2 has been a real nightmare.

I must say I find Gallery2 confusing in that it seems to simultaneously use both flat file and database storage by default. And needless to say, it’s fairly difficult to make a backup of such an enormous flat file storage system if you haven’t got root / shell access. This is the same flawed concept that manifests itself in Gallery2’s mandatory Multilanguage system that follows plugins and such. Why upload thousands of pointless files by default or ship the script preconfigured for flat file preference? It would seem the dev team has opted for the unlikeliest default options (though they may be the fastest and most productive on larger / multilingual sites).