v4 - Feature requests

First of all i really want to say thank you ncy and rapsli for your great work.

I'm following this module since its early stages and with 2.x i tried it the first time on my site. It fails because of the "I don't show you empty subfolders"-Bug, so i waited until the 3.x release and guess what : my host doesn't allow temp. tables. After some emails with them they temp. enabled me to create temp. tables and so i started to play a bit around with the current 3.x version of fast gallery. But back to topic :)

First my setup here.

I'm currently on a shared host with 36mb max. ram for php applications, a 5.x mysql(i) database and drupal 6.6. Current MaxExecutionTime is 180s, but i can change that because i have access to the php.ini. The host has a very well performance on the cpu and on the sql side. So lets say its a quality host who knows what he is doing.

My gallery consists of around 10000 pictures in scale of 3-10kb and with a subfolderstructure which is max. 7 Levels deep.

Some words to me : i'm earning my money with developing in delphi for over 8 years now. I never worked with php but i can "read" it. I've worked a lot with databases in delphi but my code knowledge of drupal ... i've look into the code some time ago, but never coded anything for it.

So if some of the things i say here make no sense, aren't possible in drupal or are some how required to be done this way : feel free to blame me ;)
A last comment before i finally get started : None of the things here are meant personally. I'm not here to flame, but to aid you making fast gallery the best gallery for drupal :)

1.) The temporary tables

For me the biggest step from drupal 5.x to the 6.x series was that they got rid of the need for temp. tables in the search. So i was kind of confused, that fastgallery requires them. I took a deeper look into the code of fastgallery and if i understand it right every time you view a page in the gallery, there are 3 temp. querys on the database?

• 1.) You should follow the 6.x way and do not use temp. queries anyway. Your gallery is aiming for "the small guy who just wants to put up some photos on his page". Seems like the permission for temp tables is standard on most hosts, because no one claimed an issue here before. But on the path to make drupal more user friendly and available to all people temp. tables should be avoided,
• 2.) There is absolutly no need for temp. queries. All the sorting you are doing with it could be done with a normal query and then sorting and modifing an array which contains the results. RAM has never been cheeper, but most hosts care if you get there CPUs under 100% load, because of complex temp. queries.
• 3.) Even if you only could do it with temp. queries. Dudes ... you know that three! heavy queries per page will no scale very good. I doubt you're site will run well when around 50-100 people are browsing your gallery.

This is the reason why i put the request on critical. You should really don't use temp. queries.

2.) The database layout

Why are you storing the parent and the folder as fullstrings in the database? You should use a integer there and list the folders in a seperate table. This reduces the size of the queries ( size of the result ). And it saves a lot space in the database.

3.) The EXIF data

You should move the exif thing to a sepeate module ( which can of cause be shipped with fast gallery ). I for example will never use the exif data on my gallery. This again will save around 100000 useless ( 1,5 mb ) entries in a table i will never use. And it will reduce the time / memory load / cpu usage of the cron while reindexing the gallery.

4.) Some smaller things

• 1.) The created url aliases are in upper and lower case depending on the folders name. This should only be lower case, because drupal normally creates lowercase aliases.
• 2.) ( I'm not sure if this is releated to my poorly coded theme :> ) The breadcrums for the gallery are under the normal breadcrums. For me it looks like
  

  Home
  Gallery > Test > Testing > Test around
  

  Shouldn't this be in one line?

Appendix

I'm sure i missed one point but i think is is enoth for tonight :)

You should take a look at http://picy.infinitesimal.org/
It has the same concept as fast gallery ( folder based gallery ) but it uses NO datebase at all. And it supports sorting to. Maybe it helps reducing fast gallerys dependency on a fast database.

Looking forward to your comments
Mario