Yet Another Photo Blog (YAPB) – WordPress Plugin

All work & no play. . makes me kinda grumyish, ya know? So, I took a bit of a break yesterday and gave a complete overhaul to my photoblog, SnappingPhotos.com. It was fun, quick and easy – I wanted the design to be VERY light and simple. I am pretty sure I succeeded with that –you don’t get much more light and simple than this:

While you are at it – check out a few of the photos I have posted recently:

A little history…

The photoblog started in 2005 and it was powered by WordPress one point something back then. In those days, there really wasn’t much in the way of image management with WordPress, so much of what I was doing at that time was all manual stuff.

In 2006, I converted the photoblog to the PixelPost software. It’s a nice little application. Not overly powerful, but it really just suited my purposes at the time, which was to have a fast, easy and quick way to upload my photos, have them autothumbnailed and archived – providing me with the ability to leave a short description of the photo and any visitors who happened to stop by, the ability to comment on them. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Then, awhile ago, my friend, Leanne, shared a link to a new plugin on the block that allowed you the ability to run a fully functional photoblog with extreme ease. It’s a WordPress plugin, which means that you are able to use the WordPress software and any plugins, additions, modifications that you want – along with this photoblog plugin and have a photoblog with all the WordPress goodness available today. It’s very cool – but I didn’t really have the time to play around with it for quite awhile – – I had a book to write and clients to design for.

Yesterday, however, I finally took the time and found out that it didn’t take any time at all. I wiped out my PixelPost installation and installed WordPress, installed the plugin and created the very simple template for it and I was done. It took me all of an hour.. if that.

So what is this great plugin? It is called Yet Another Photoblog (YAPB) created by Johannes Jarolim. Here’s some info pulled directly from Johannes’s site:

What is YAPB / What can you expect?

• A non invasive WordPress-plugin that converts wp into a easy useable photoblog system
• Easy image upload – All wordpress post-features can be used
• On the fly thumbnail generation – Use multiple thumbnail sizes where and when you need them: Thumbnail generation gets controlled from the template.
• EXIF data processing and output
• Self-learning EXIF filter – Your own cameras tags can be selected to be viewed.
• Full i18n-Support through gnutext mo/po files
• Ping additional update-service-sites when posting a photoblog entry.
• Nearly every WP-theme can become a photoblog in virtually no time.

Fabulous plugin, really. Creating designs for it is not any more difficult than creating WordPress themes – as a matter of fact, you could contact us at E.Webscapes for a quote on a custom photoblog theme using the YAPB WordPress plugin, if you wanted to (shameless plug, I know!)

Big kudos and thanks to Johannes for this plugin — I hit his donation button today for this one, if you’re using it, you should too! I’m all about supporting great development projects like this one!