The Wicked Good Gallery was a lot of fun to build. It meets the stated requirements, I like the design, and I learned some good stuff.

One issue that always concerns me is performance. The Wicked Good Gallery demo has seven images, and on each page load, it reads the image directories, tests for a thumbnail and detailed image, and if they don’t exist, it creates them from the first .jpg in the directory it finds. The issue is that in most cases, when images are posted, they won’t change. This isn’t a versioned gallery, only the last image uploaded will be offered to site visitors.

For that reason, you can assume that the only time you need to test for new files is when the list of directories changes. You can further extend it to only rebuild new directories, but then you risk the problem of only testing for content in new directories, not refreshing any existing images.

Therefore, a simple caching solution was implemented. When the page loads, the code tests for the presence of a cache file. If the file is present, it compares the directories listed in the cache file to those it reads on the server. It they match, the cached list of artwork is used, otherwise, the cache is rebuilt.

$bUpdateCache=false;
$aDirectoryCache=array();
if (is_file($sDirectoryCache))
        include $sDirectoryCache;
else
        $bUpdateCache=true;
$aDirectories=glob($sArtworkDir.'/*');
if ($aDirectoryCache!=$aDirectories)
{
        foreach ($aDirectories as $k => $v)
        {
                if (is_file($v.'/'.$sArt) && is_file($v.'/'.$sThumb))
                        $aPieces[]=$v;
                else
                        if (make_images($v,$sArt,$iArtHeight,$sThumb,$iThumbHeight))
                                $aPieces[]=$v;
        }
        $bUpdateCache=true;
}
else
        $aDirectories=$aDirectoryCache;
if ($bUpdateCache)
        file_put_contents($sDirectoryCache,'<?php $aDirectoryCache='.var_export($aDirectories,true).';'.PHP_EOL.
                '$aPieces='.var_export($aPieces,true).'; ?>');

There was about a 0.0002 second improvement in performance. Although that sounds trivial, more rigorous testing, with more images, would likely justify the implementation. There is a performance penalty if the cache is removed, but it’s very small, since the cache is built with var_exports.

The prevention added was a base http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_base.asp tag. This tag ensures all files are drawn from the correct directories, while still allowing relative references in the code.

<base href="http://wirehopper.com/wickedgoodgallery/" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" />

In this case, the base URL is http://wirehopper.com/wickedgoodgallery/, and the style tag will draw from http://wirehopper.com/wickedgoodgallery/css/style.css, regardless of any slashes submitted in the URI, the page will display properly, and future references, derived by page navigation (clicking on images and links) will be valid.