Integrate phpBB with a full featured photo album

So heres the deal: I wanted to set up phpbb for a group of ~40 people who went to summer vacation together. I also wanted them to be able to upload photos of the trip to some kind of photo album. There is a whole bunch of software out there, that would have filled my needs, but only as a standalone version, which means that my users would have needed to create two seperate accounts, one for phpBB and the other one for the photo album software. That’d clearly suck, so i went searching for a nice phpBB photo album mod. There are a lot of these too, but I didn’t really found any of theme nearly as good as all those standalone packages. After a while I stumbled upon phpBB3 Gallery2 Integration which does what the title says: it integrates phpBB3 (and older versions) with the wonderful Open-Source Project Gallery. Gallery offers a full featured photo album software completely written in php/mysql. It offers a wide range of plugins and is highly configurable. Gallery is set up quickly if you want to test it. So after setting up Gallery and testing it for a while I decided to use the Integration package which will turn off Registration and User-Management of Gallery and will synchronize each phpBB user with your new photo album software, so you’ll only have one login for two very nice pieces of software. I gotta say though, the installation can be a bit tricky, especially when your Gallery is already filled with content and when you use Gallery’s url rewriting package. If you’re familiar with modding your phpBB, the integration will take you about 2 to 3 hours. If youre not familiar with modding, then you’ll most likely need quite more time, especially if youre a newbie to html,php and stuff. Eventhough it’s a lot of work for one integration package, it’s really worth the time, because afterwards you’ll have a lot of fun with your new phpBB with an integrated full featured photo album! The guys over at nukedgallery.net even offer payed support and payed installation, so if you’re too lazy or too much of a newbie, there’s hope for you too!

Don’t forget to backp first! 😉