Hi there people ! I'm the "french guy" who set up this blog and the gallery.
Ok, i wasn't supposed to talk at all about it on MeizuMe until someone else did but anyway if i had been, you'd still have beat me to it.
A few months ago I started to work with err0r on a php skin gallery just like DChronos has (re-)imagined it. I had an operational upload system and started working on a thumbnail and rating system too.
But look at it from this point of view :
- Multiple skin versions = multiple resource files. People are always asking skin creators to update their
old skins to the
latest version. Not the other way round.
- A resource file is approx. 6.5mb => upload via http is painful, for some people it's impossible (depends on the server too).
- Thus, people would have to zip or rar their skins.
- Who knows what's in the zip or rar file ? Personally I hate having lots of crap in my archive files when I DL something. Not to mention the possibility of having a wrong version of resource.bin in the wrong archive file. If the Admin uploads files, things are much more likely to be organized and bear clean, normalized names.
Making users upload their own files is pretty cool, but IMO it just makes things harder when it comes to maintain a clean, efficient skin sharing system.
And that explains why all skins are in 2.003.2b.
By the way, back then, err0r didn't want the gallery to be a full part of MeizuMe, more of a secondary site. So even though I love coding, i was not going to build an entire website coding thousands of php lines all by myself without making a living out of it.
So when I started this french blog, I thought "oh the hell with all this structured time-eating skin-sharing site, what we need is a
gallery. A
skin gallery". Sure, a rating / commenting form would be nice, and vB has lots of gallery plugins of this kind.
- But hey, what do people want ?
Skins.
- How do they chose them ? By browsing through
thumbnails.
=> ok let's make the simplest gallery there is, allowing people to quickly browse and download the best-looking skins without making a fuss. No page reloading, everything is loaded in flash and the whole application is ultra fast and easy to use.
When I began this french "gallery", I skimmed all the skin topics one by one, and downloaded / converted / translated / screenshot each and every skin. Took me a whole day, but still much less time than building an entire website, for a still pretty cool result.
I'm not trying to cast a shadow on you work, i guess we're working on two slightly different things. And I truly hope you succeed and work out something as big and cool as you describe it
So keep up the good work d00d :D