gallery 2 intergration with Drupal 6

It's certainly not an easy road for anyone if they are a beginner at either application. It took me (as a novice) a couple of weeks to get it going and it still doesn't do what I want. My PHP skills are below basic but some day I am hoping to hack into some of this code and see if I can make it work right. So in brief, just realize that even in the best of circumstances, that showing your Gallery2 albums from your Drupal implementation is not always exactly what you think or wish it will be.

For example ...... Getting the userid/password sync to work between both applications (assuming disable registration on Gallery2 and use the Drupal exclusively), this (surprisingly) was the first thing I got going and there appears to date no problem with it. The catch is however that if you do a straight link to your G2 website from your Drupal, your user will have to manually log into the Gallery2 site even though they are logged into Drupal. This is horribly confusing. Add to this a "Login from Facebook" and even my IT champion son walks away from my website due to all the caveats. Now this is only if you require a password to log into either of them, and if no password is required well actually, then why would you be using it I suppose is the question.

You can skip this problem and use the plugin as a "wrapper" (use the plug-in to call Gallery2 from within Drupal) and assuming you have success, the password is magically propagated to Gallery 2 and the chosen plugin-G2-template is shown within a frame of sorts inside of Drupal (I will call it a "wrapper" - sorry but I don't know the actual terms for some of the things I am doing and or complaining about, so forgive me in this area; perhaps someone can clarify). You would think the "wrapper" or framed method would be the best but what I found is that the spacing is all off and I ended up spending several more days trying to modify a very vanilla and basic Gallery 2 theme to "imbed" in this manner inside of Drupal and never got all the features of Gallery 2 click-able from within that frame.

In other words, I gave up on the imbedded Gallery 2 frame in Drupal and plan to spend some time trying to figure out how to just pass the password forward to Gallery using the synced Drupal ID/password. What I am looking for is to eliminate the login to Gallery2 if I am logged into Drupal. Otherwise using the in frame method the administrator can get so deep into customizing frames and trying to make this or that work that unless they are a really good coder, its easy to go quickly down the tubes trying to make it work. Add to this the redirect activity for someone who doesn't have a clue what is going on there, and you see that things get complicated.

So what I plan to do next is try to hack into the code so that the password will somehow propagate and no framing takes place. My research turned up a few tidbits about someone briefly touching on how to incorporate the login ID/PW via the URL call to Gallery 2 from Drupal but that is not secure nor a good idea. At this point and since my online offering is only photos that anyone can see and comment on assuming they are logged in, I may just end up going that route. Then after that, I'll see if I can figure out if there is any way to make "Log-in from Facebook" seamless. (Using it now with the plugin allows you to login from face book but you have to remember your original ID on Drupal, not the one from Facebook and then enter that ID & PW when the Gallery 2 sites pops up.)

Summary: When I started using Gallery 2 and Drupal for my personal travel photo journal about 4 years ago, I had high hopes. Without passwords, the combo works rather well. But soon you may want to allow users to ad comments, then you find that your comments start filling with sexual enhancement spam. Then you nail that by adding some more protection (no pun) and find you need a captcha to keep the spam bots from signing up for IDs, then you are required the dual login if you provide a "View my photos" from Drupal, then your viewers start complaining and leaving the site because they can't get past all the levels of security for what they see is a waste of their time. You then might even try making it easier for them by setting up "Log in with Facebook" and all of a sudden you are in deeper than you had planned and no one will even come to your site any longer.

I am not trying to discourage you but trying to unmask any misconceptions about this plug-in and all the obstacles potentially there are. If you want simply to link to a photo or two in your Gallery2 from inside a Drupal page or "wrapper", then this set-up will likely work well for you once you get it configured. If you want to provide full feature browser facility where a single log-in is required to access both G2 & Drupal, then it gets complicated and frustrating very quickly.