Are there freeware/open source as good as Gallery but that work on WebTV?

September 23, 2004 8:13 PM

My dad uses WebTV to surf the net and send email. However, we're discovering that he can't see pages that end in .php, which rules out my Gallery site, which is one of the main reasons he got on the net in the first place. Anyone have any ideas for freeware/open source photo sites as good as Gallery, but that can be viewed in WebTV? (Thanks to silusGROK's question below for reminding me to ask this.)
posted by stupidsexyFlanders to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

First and foremost, maybe you should look into getting that fixed for him. It should, actually, work. Although perhaps there's something particular to Gallery that doesn't.

I myself use Apache::Album which produces output simple enough to be visible with WebTV and which has excellent filesystem integration (since I use the filesystem for content management). If you want more CMS-like features, though, it's not for you.
posted by majick at 8:18 PM on September 23, 2004

Uh, how about Flickr? I don't know how well the WebTV browser supports css, but there aren't any .php extensions, as far as I know. You might run in to some .gne's...
posted by maniactown at 8:37 PM on September 23, 2004

Apparently WebTV doesn't support css very well, after all. WebTV does support Flash, though, which the Flickr system employs nicely.
posted by maniactown at 8:44 PM on September 23, 2004

Do you have control over the webserver? Does it run Apache? You can do a lot with Apache's mod_rewrite module. In this case, I'm thinking mapping an ending his setup recognises to .php might help. Even if you have a shared host you may find you can do this through a .htaccess file.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:59 PM on September 23, 2004

I thought Gallery actually already used mod_rewrite extensively to make sure no pages with .php endings appear. My Gallery just has urls like:

http://www.site.com/folder/folder/albumname

You might want to muck around with the settings a little bit and see if you've got the URL cleanup/simplification feature turned on.

My regrets on your parental's condition.
posted by scarabic at 9:17 PM on September 23, 2004

This is also really easy to set up in IIS, and I don't see why a web host would have a problem with it. You just map the .html extension to php.exe. You'd have to rewrite links and included pages in the gallery, of course.
posted by TungstenChef at 10:31 PM on September 23, 2004