After considerable reflection and discussion, we've decided the time has come for us to step aside and seek new owners for Koken. As much as we'd like to stay, all of us have decided to pursue new professional opportunities that will prevent us from…
Quelle: Koken is for sale and looking for a new home - Koken blog
It seems to be the motto of Koken, which I once praised quite a bit here. It is still one of the best-looking gallery systems with a really sleek admin interface. But all that sleekness cannot hide the fact that the code underneath is probably not as sleek as the layout after some problems that were almost not debuggable. To this day, the login form has problems with Chrome and Safari - and they haven't solved the problem. From the reactions, it's not even clear if they care at all. How stupid is it when a login form doesn't work because of some JavaScript hacks under Chrome? It's a simple form with username and password, what's so big about JavaScript there?
The crown was the Lightroom plugin again today. I used Koken because my old blog workflow - thanks to the stupid decision of the WP programmers to scrap the entire Atom publishing and let it rot instead of fixing it - went down the drain. I don't want anything complicated - just a simple way to upload a stack of pictures online with one click directly from Lightroom. It also works if the target is Flickr or Picasa or one of the other supported online services. But I want to control my pictures myself - and host them myself. Well, if a plugin just creates an empty album but doesn't upload a single picture (even though it fiddles around for hours and pretends to be active), then it's all just for the worse. If there are no logs or debugging possibilities or messages anywhere that help in the analysis, then it's all just for the trash.
So, for the time being, pictures will probably end up here again, currently with Dossier de Presse, a plugin for Lightroom that publishes via XMLRPC to WordPress. Which is not optimal, but the only thing currently available that works with current WordPress, current Lightroom, and at all. Since no metadata is transferred via XMLRPC in WordPress, such as image titles, I will probably have to remove this from my gallery layout somehow, otherwise only strange technical image names will appear there. Titling pictures is stupid anyway.
Computers could be so much more fun if software wasn't programmed by amateurs and blockheads 90% of the time ...
This time only as a link to my photo site (built with Koken), instead of directly here: Vienna Calling. At the moment, I'm still undecided, it could be that I also select a few pictures and upload them here, so that it stays a bit more colorful here. There are still a few questions that I have with the Koken themes and a few inconsistencies. Maybe I will deal with the themes myself and adapt them more to my requirements, but for now it works quite well - the workflow of Lightroom is hardly to be surpassed.
Koken - Creative website publishing. Already tweeted about this yesterday, find this quite interesting - looks good and the Lightroom Publish Plugin sounds very interesting as well. I'm considering whether I might need a photo-centric system instead of WordPress, at least for all my pictures. And a usable integration with Lightroom would make a lot of things easier. Especially since the last WordPress update destroyed my photo workflow.