The need to innovate and improve is certainly consistent with my personality 🙂

Two pieces of software I’m not 100% happy with, but have no alternatives: except to write my own. (actually there’s probably more, but only these two I’ve given serious thought about pursuing)

NAS Solution

One is a free/open source NAS solution that is OS independent. I know of FreeNAS and OpenFiler but both are plagued by the same disease. Extremely slow support and very infrequent updates.
I’d like to put together an OS independent linux file server front-end. Building on  what webmin has done (maybe just a webmin plugin that consolidates all the file-sharing tools in one location). Building on webmin would be easy as it’s already making use of all the tools that are required to manage a file server (though the webmin interface is not particularly oriented to file server management).

The other tool I am not happy with is ZenPhoto. I’m not happy with it due to its very limited selection of themes. WordPress has endless theme selection but (compared to ZenPhoto) poor photo mamagement tools. I love the photo management tools in ZenPhoto. If somehow WordPress and ZenPhoto could be merged in a seamless manner I’d be thrilled; unfortunately I haven’t found such a solution yet. There are some plugins out there for wordpress to bring in photos from ZenPhoto, but it’s cumbersome.
I really like that (in ZepPress) all I need to do is FTP some photos in a folder and they get posted on the ZenPhoto site. No extra messing with front end interface to import or set up albums. The file/folder structure is reflected in the structure of the image folders/sub-folders. I like that.

Photo Gallery/Blog

Part of what I want is a web-gallery and blog to have the same theme allow for seamless navigation from blog to gallery and back.  Also having to manage two separate systems (zen photo for photos and wordpress for blog) is more time consuming. I have used the ZepPage features of ZenPhoto, (to integrate the blog in ZenPhoto) but there are only 1/2 dozen themes available for zenpage enables sites.

I know I could just write a theme to my liking for ZenPhoto/ZenPage, but if I’m going to do some coding, I’d prefer to do some higher level stuff, where ANY theme could be used, hence using wordpress as the frontend, and work on integrating zenphoto photo management into wordpress.