Rainbow, Guestbook, nGallery Integration
Installed Rainbow and have been working with it to design a site for wedding information. One thing annoying about it is its layout/theme handling. It does everything through user controls and it can be a bit of a pain to get everything to work right. This is only at first, once you get the hang of it, it isn't as bad. The thing that gets me is you have your theme, and then you have your page layout. Aren't those one in the same? You change your theme and it changes the colors, some of the icon images, and the stylesheet. Then the page layout handles the header, footer, nav bar, etc. One kind of depends on the other. I changed the page layout to one of the ones that comes with it and it made the header and nav bar stuff a light blue and the theme was still a default yellow one. So if you wanted that page layout, you had to design your own theme with everything blue... or change the page layout to yellow. Kind of querky.
Once I got through that stuff, I went onto adding the content and was disappointed when I found there are no guestbook modules for Rainbow. At least none I could actually find. So what does any determined developer do? Write their own! I'd tried using the announcements module for it, and setting add access to All, but still got access denied if I wasn't a registered user. So I wrote a custom little guestbook module, based on the announcements one. It works super though. I'll probably package it up and make it available online on Monday. Figure there are probably some other people who'd like to use.
Started working on integrating nGallery with Rainbow this afternoon as well. Spent most of my time conceptualizing and brain storming on how to handle it, but started making some progress. Got it to show the main album listing page, but before I go any further, going to have to make some changes to nGallery.
First, need a new theme for nGallery. Can't use the default ones for an embedded setup. Second, would like to convert the .aspx pages for nGallery into controls / user controls of some sort. That way I don't have to duplicate them, I can just load them from within the module. Third, need to change how nGallery generates URLs. Right now, they're all just hard coded. Won't work... can't link directly to the nGallery pages. Need to change it to be sensative to its mode and generate the necessary URL based on if it is in standalone mode, Rainbow mode, .Text, IBSPortal, etc. That will be pretty. All and all though, getting a nice little road map to integration. Should be pretty cool!