With the help of a plug-in and several strategically placed tweaks I’ve managed to convince WordPress and Gallery to play nicely together.

Here’s my terse guide if you would like to follow in my footsteps. I’m going to assume that you are actually reading the provided installation materials and not solely relying on my terrible guide.

1) Install WordPress

This was quite a while ago, so I’m not going to be much help with this one. Follow the documentation and you’ll be fine.

2) Install Gallery

Installing Gallery is surprisingly easy. The install script is great and tells you exactly what is wrong and how to go about fixing it. Once installed I had no problem going through and configuring everything… well except for themes. I couldn’t really find a layout I was happy with, and I’m not looking forward to hacking around with the provided templates.

3) Install plug-in

Installing the plug-in in the same fashion as all WordPress plugins. Download, extract into WordPress directory, activate plugin, done. When configuring the plug-in you provide the URL to your gallery and it auto configures based on that.

i) If you’re using sub domains (e.g. blog.mydomain.com and gallery.mydomain.com) then you may have issues. I was able to solve this by disabling Gallery’s URL rewrite feature.

ii) Make sure that your WordPress user has the same name as the Gallery user. If not they won’t match up and the automatic logging in won’t function correctly. WordPress won’t let you rename the admin account but Gallery2 will.

iii) I ended up hacking up the template to add the Gallery “page”. There is a nicer way by using yet another plug-in. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader.
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You can view my gallery by visiting the handy gallery link along the top bar. I’m still adding images so consider yourself warned.

Previously i mentioned that hosting was on a Xen virtual machine. This is incorrect. It is actually accomplished with a Virtuozzo virtual machine. Admittedly the outbreak of virtualization technologies is making it harder to keep track of all the solutions available.

Virtuozzo is implemented at a slightly higher level than Xen. Xen exposes an API for modified operating system kernels to use to perform their relevant tasks. Virtuozzo on the other hand, uses just one kernel which partitions resources and acts like multiple machines.

Which is better? Well that would depend on who you ask.

Xen offers more choice allowing for things like running BSD under Linux.
Virtuozzo in theory would have less virtualization overhead, and possibly better overall management of resources.

For further reading I suggest you start out at Wikipedia – Virtualization.

This site is now hosted on a Xen Virtuozzo virtual server hosted by TecTonic. While not free, it does allow for near complete administration of the server. So most of my time these last couple of days has been consumed by setting it all up and rediscovering the joys of absent, incorrect, and just plain wrong documentation. Fortunately I can use this experience as an incentive to fully document and improve the usability of my own programs.

Also thanks to WordPress this site is now dynamically generated (if you hadn’t noticed). Goodbye to managing text files and worrying about html formatting.

Well I’ve finally gotten around to finding a new home for my site. While there is not much on here at the moment at least there is something.