The last time I added a photo gallery or a WordPress blog to a site, it was the early 2000s and I had to download the requisite files and FTP them to the appropriate folders on the server myself. Imagine my delight, then, at being able to install them both with just a few clicks!
Since photography is a hobby of mine, I knew that I was interested in adding a photo gallery, but I couldn’t decided whether to go with ZenPhoto or Coppermine. Web searches didn’t really help, so after reading the documentation and features of both offerings, I went with the former: ZenPhoto explicitly details how it could be modified via HTML5 and CSS, plus it had been updated most recently.
After the install, I uploaded pictures, added captions, and named the gallery. I next needed to find a theme. I first tried a theme based visually on WordPress, thinking that it might be easier to match the theme of my blog and photo galley, but I quickly found that its look was very spare and that the annotations for each photo, confusingly, were placed under the thumbnail of the next photo in the gallery. Next, I tried a theme called Zenpage and was initially satisfied with it until I decided, for the sake of experimentation, to try the default theme. The default theme was actually perfect for my needs – spare and spartan without being sparse – so I decided to use it. I might modify the colors a bit, but overall I am very happy with it.