Posted by alanmels on Mon, Oct 28, 2019 - 6:58am

We have an AltaGrade customer with Drupal 7 with lot's of different features that all can be easily replicated on Backdrop. And initial pitching Backdrop to this customer went quite good and we've got their positive feedback. The only obstacle not to move ahead with the migration is the fact that the photo gallery on the website is based on Node Gallery module. Unfortunately, not only the https://backdropcms.org/modules?s=gallery page doesn't list the module (so it's not been ported), but also gives quite limited options of alternatives.

So I wonder what path the experienced Backdrop users would recommend to our use case? Does any good photo gallery solution exist for Backdrop? If there is none yet, then AltaGrade team would get one of the D7 modules ported, however before starting to spend time and to put efforts into porting anything, maybe we should find the best candidate. For example, some Drupal 7 users prefer Photos over Node Gallery. Maybe there are some other even better candidate alternatives for porting to Backdrop.

Most helpful answers

@alanmels - I think you may

@alanmels - I think you may have gotten this advice in Gitter already, but in a situation like this, it is worth checking Github contrib https://github.com/backdrop-contrib to see if anyone has started to port a useful module. Sometimes, you can find a relatively stabile version of a desired Drupal 7 module that has simply not yet been released yet. 

There are quite a few of these partially ported modules on Github that will not show up on BackdropCMS.org until there is a stabile release. Some of them are stabile enough to use or could be with relatively little work. 

 

Comments

Mon, Oct 28, 2019 - 1:16pm by stpaultim

@alanmels - I think you may have gotten this advice in Gitter already, but in a situation like this, it is worth checking Github contrib https://github.com/backdrop-contrib to see if anyone has started to port a useful module. Sometimes, you can find a relatively stabile version of a desired Drupal 7 module that has simply not yet been released yet. 

There are quite a few of these partially ported modules on Github that will not show up on BackdropCMS.org until there is a stabile release. Some of them are stabile enough to use or could be with relatively little work. 

 

Thu, Oct 31, 2019 - 2:30am by alanmels

@stpaultim - yes, I somehow missed that we see on https://backdropcms.org/modules is not the same as what is on https://github.com/backdrop-contrib. Thanks for reminding, I will take a look there too.

BTW, this made me think why not to make https://backdropcms.org/modules to show all the contrib modules which are on https://github.com/backdrop-contrib, even those which do not have "official" releases, just marking them properly as development branches?

mazze's picture

Tue, Oct 29, 2019 - 3:42am by mazze

I used Photoswipe a lot with D7, it has also a Backdrop port https://backdropcms.org/project/photoswipe

But for the last couple of sites, my preferred way for galleries is to create a View and adapt the Views TPL files. It's easier, more straightforward and gives me more control over it. Here's an example how I overwrote views-view-unformatted.tpl.php (I am using UIKIT as CSS framwork, not Bootstrap).

<?php if (!empty($title)): ?>
  <h3><?php print $title; ?></h3>
<?php endif; ?>
<div class="uk-child-width-1-4@m uk-child-width-1-3@s uk-child-width-1-2 uk-grid-small" uk-grid uk-lightbox="animation: slide">
<?php foreach ($rows as $row_count => $row): ?>
  <div <?php if (!empty($row_classes[$row_count])) { print 'class="' . implode(' ', $row_classes[$row_count]) . '"';  } ?>>
    <?php print $row; ?>
  </div>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</div>

Works lik a charm, click the two pictures on the page bottom: https://backdrop.mazze.ch/de/blog/hier-k%C3%B6nnen-wir-einen-etwas-l%C3%...

Thu, Oct 31, 2019 - 2:40am by alanmels

Thanks for feedbacks, guys. Using Views or Views Slideshow is a good alternative, which we probably go with in the end. However, Node Gallery is not just a "viewer", but rather a "navigator catalog" with lot's of categorized albums and links like "next", "previous", "top", "back to album", etc. As I said there would be no such a module like Node Gallery as if it was so easy to build fully fledge photogallery without it. So maybe something like Node Gallery needs to be either ported or created for Backdrop.

@mazze, we've looked at PhotoSwipe and all other available options, nice one indeed, but our customer wants to preserve all the features that they currently have.