New Gallery for 1,000 Chapters Project
The old gallery proved to be too much trouble to keep updated on a regular basis. With new fan made chapters turning up all the time (like Bolter and Chainsword's Iron Gauntlet Challenge) I needed an easier way to keep it maintained. I wanted to separate the marines in the old pages into their individual pics, so I could reorder them, but will 1,000 marines this was going to be a bit of a headache. The only answer was to get a proper gallery system to handle this (and on that could automate alphabetical order would be nice). After having a look about, I plumbed for the excellent nextGEN Gallery plugin for WordPress. It seems pretty robust, but only time will tell if it (or my host) can handle 1,000 images in a single gallery!
After playing about with the gallery a bit, I started converting the old gallery into the new one. This may take a while as I have to cut up all the old '20 marines per picture' pages into the individual marines and then upload 'em to the new gallery. I've managed 10 pages so far (I've no idea how Dazzo kept his sanity as this is incredibly tedious!) but I think it will be worth it in the end.
Update: The conversion of old gallery is complete (757 chapters in total)
Update: Added 70 'blanks' for canon chapters that are known but lack a colour scheme (832 chapters in total)
Update: We are passed the 1,000 mark!
The gallery has some interesting features, and one of these is image 'tags'. Using tags you can create galleries that only show the images with a specific tag. I thought this would be very useful in dividing up the 1,000 chapters so that fans could quickly isolate the chapters they are looking for. Below is a gallery based on the tag "first".
This only shows the 1st founding (loyalist) chapters. These images are within the main gallery, but are plucked out based on this tag. This will save me from making multiple galleries and duplicating images. As a future possibility I may be able to use one page for the gallery and reload the gallery images based on tags! The only problem is that the tag based galleries can not take specific custom templates and seem to be a little isolated form the main gallery system. It's all new to me, but I sure there is a way...
The full (prototype) gallery can be found here: 1,000 Chapters
Which will eventually replace the old gallery [edit: link removed]
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4 Responses
Hearing feedback is very important to me in developing my ideas. Much of my designs are inspired, and crafted, by chatting to fans on forums before snowballing into a full concept you'll find here. I would like to thank all those who have contributed critiques and participated in discussions over the years, and I would especially like to thank all those who commented on this specific topic. If you would like join in, you are most welcome!
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I just wanted to say that your devotion to my favorite fictional warriors is, well, it's wonderful. Keep up the good work! Lemme know if you need any new chapters!
I'm always on the look out for new chapters! Check out this B+C thread on how to submit new chapters to the project.
Philip
Wow! Just stumbled on your post at the B&C about this project; what an excellent idea with great execution. I'd like to help you out in getting my own chapter added to the project, and maybe add some more. I posted a SM Painter pic on your B&C post, and provided a link to my old and defunct website I ran for about 6 months while I was in college (here). I tried to get going again on this website (here), but that ran into a different set of problems. At the very least, you can see a lot of photos and my initial chapter stories.
Unfortunately, many of my ideas for my chapter's founding are no longer "acceptable" within the B&C/SM Community, and I have yet to figure out how to re-write my fluff for an IA Article. But this has inspired me to give it another shot.
Also, I perused your current Chapter list, and found a few "omissions":
Emperor's Finest: Green/Tan Camouflage. If you look in my "blog" gallery, you can see one of their Vindicator Tanks still painted.
Rolling Thunder: Great Blue/Black/White paint scheme
I can contact the owner of the Emperor's Finest, and there's maybe 2 degrees of separation between me and the Rolling Thunder player. At the very least, I can contact someone with the paint scheme. I might be able to get you a few more Chapter Names and paint schemes/symbols as well.
You might want to e-mail Kenton Kilgore, owner of the Fighting Tigers of Veda website. I'm sure he could give you quite a few names and colors as well.
Good luck with this, and thank you
Mike
Thanks Mike,
You're welcome, and I hope you do take another shot at your IA!
I'll continue the discussion over on B+C as I see you have joined the thread (link)
Philip