Zenphoto Album Name Hack

ZenPhoto is a pretty robust, but light weight photo gallery software.  The front-end is pretty sparse, but the framework is excellent – meaning you can customize the layout in almost any way at the site, album, and image level without needing to hack the core source.  One thing I needed to do was to change the CSS of individual galleries at the site level, which unfortunately you can’t do out of the box.

Luckily, I was able to find pretty quickly some functions in the admin-functions back-end that I was able to call in the template and integrate it fairly easily, all with ‘native’ code. So here’s what you would see when looking at a gallery by default:

<div id="albums">
<div class="album">...</div>
    <div class="album">...</div>
</div>

Browse to your theme directory and edit index.php to look like the following:

<div id="albums">
    <?php while (next_album()): ?>
        <div class="album" id="<?php echo seoFriendly(getAlbumTitle()); ?>">
            …
        </div>
    <?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

the echo seoFriendly(); function is the key here, and in the end you’ll have something that looks like this:

<div id="albums">
<div class="album" id="escaped-album-title">...</div>
    <div class="album" id="another-valid-html-title">...</div>
</div>

If all of your album titles are safe (no spaces, punctuation, special characters, etc…) then you could just use getAlbumTitle(); but if they’re not, you won’t pass validation.