I always knew that sorting out the galleries was going to take a long time. It’s taking even longer than I thought. I’ve decided to provide more ways of categorising the images. Whereas before, it was only possible to break down the British galleries into different classes of species (birds, mammals, etc), it will now be possible to do the same with all other countries. This has two implications from a development point of view.
Firstly, the introductory gallery page now needs to accommodate in excess of 60 links, and this will only grow over time. In trying to provide a more navigable gallery, there’s the risk of making it too complicated. I’ve overcome this by hiding all links until a visitor starts to home in on the section they’re interested in. For example, only when someone clicks on, say, ‘South Africa’, the page will expand to reveal the links that will take them to the respective galleries.
The second thing is that to provide this functionality will involve me making some structural changes to the database, and some new SQL queries to extract the appropriate records to build the new galleries. Previously, I’d used the same table item to determine whether a photograph was taken overseas as I’d used to determine whether a photograph showed a British bird, mammal, reptile, etc. In other words, each photo was of a British mammal, bird, etc or it was taken overseas, and the class of species was not recorded. It shouldn’t take me long to make these changes, and that’s my next task…
Each time I think the site is ready, these extra tasks come along, but it’s getting closer!