*What is gimpgallery?--*
gimpgallery is a website made for the gimp users communities from all
over the world, to give them a special place to store and share images,
animations, drawings, videos made with the best open-source software for
raster graphic.
It is a complete suite providing everything we need to make our graphics
shine in a dynamic website and to share our thoughts, projects, ideas
starting from or leading to the gimp.
*---Where is it?*
gimpgallery isn't officially online, you find a splash page at
http://gimpgallery.net
But the reason we keep it in a test environment is that we need to
populate it with your images, animations, graphics.
this is why we are introducing it in the gimp communities to make people
see it and start using it.
You find the whole website at http://test.gimpgallery.net
It is totally usable, you are invited to register, to post graphics, to
look around because we have to debug it too and we only need to complete
some sections.
The images you see right now on the website, as well as the forum topics
and the comments are taken from inkscapegallery
(http://inkscapegallery.net) and there's only one user (that is me...)
just to show the way gimpgallery will look when it will be populated.
*
Why did you do this?--*
Because we have many resources in the web about gimp, we may find many
tutorials, many single galleries and many communities talking about gimp
and using it.
But we miss a website especially meant to collect our graphics, images
in a gallery website where to look happily about how many people is
using the gimp just for fun, for arts and why not, even for work purposes.
We couldn't tell anyone where to go to see what gimp can do, but
primarily what people already do with this software. Now we will.
We know GUG as the biggest gimp graphics archive and we hope to host as
many images they do and maybe more...
*Is it for everyone or just an elite?*
It is made for the communities and for any gimp user, everyone can
publish images right after registering on the website.
But it is not only meant for artists because many people do know gimp
without using it actually; we would like to bring them on the website,
suggesting to give gimp a try...maybe they will be the best designers
some day.
Everyone can participate, even not only posting images but writing
comments, voting or asking question in the forums
*-Forums? So this is not only an image gallery website!--*
gimp gallery is a big community website, it provides a powerful images
and video handling but it holds more than this.
You see forums, a tutorial section, a gimp presentation, links to
download it, private messages for registered users, a personal section
for any single artist.
So our focus is on images and galleries 'cause these were missing in
the gimp communities, but gimpgallery gives you some of the features you
may find on gimpusers, gimptalk, meetthegimp and others, in a secondary
goal.
These are fantastic websites and we only wanted to fill the gap they
have about users images upload and galleries.
We wanted to make gimpgallery as good as we could; as good as the
software we used was able to.
*So tell us, which software?--*
gimp gallery is made with drupal, an open-source cms, we knew it quite
well and we do better now after working hardly on it.
It is a great cms, even though it is not still "perfect", we tried to
make it work the best it could, now you decide if we did in a good way!
*it is a deja-vu or i'm remembering another gallery
website?---*
Probably you went to visit inkscape gallery, the first step of this
project to give the open source graphic softwares communities the best
place to show what they can do, as well as their users.
We had a good starting point, we took inkscape gallery and we started
working to suit drupal to another software like gimp, with different
needs to improve it.
At the beginning we planned just to change layout and something bare
like the source files upload and something else.
but then we realized that we had something more to do and gimp gallery
is quite different from inkscape gallery. It shares its heart but it has
its own features, its own personality.
*
--what is new in gimp gallery?-*
There are many new features, especially about content organization.
But there's something we chose to put on trial and that we are proud to
present on gimp gallery:
we brought the best and powerful javascripts for image presentation and
for image galleries into drupal dinamycally. These are reflex.js
(http://www.netzgesta.de/reflex/), imageflow.js
(http://194.95.111.244/~countzero/scripts/_myImageFlow/) both using the
coverflow technique (it is a trademark of Apple ink,) and the
jcarousel.js matching the reflex.js.
These are really amazing javascripts and we were able to make them work
in a totally dynamic website, where users post their content
