I have brought photos back to the site, but in a new way.

I really liked Pictorialis, after I hacked it up of course, but there was still the issue of integration.  Pic was a seperate installation of WP which just added to the complexity of my database structure, and produced some unwanted effects when I say, upgraded by blog installation and all the photoblog tables were modified as well, which would make the PB break.

So when I redesigned the site I decided to go another way with my photography.  I have toyed with flickr and I love it, but I am a little put off by the concept of relying on a third party to host and preserve my photos.  And you know, I now PAY for web server space and bandwidth so I thought I should be using it.

I have recently given in and moved to the Theme System that ships with 1.3.x/1.5.x so I sat down and looked for a way to make it do my bidding.  The result is Visual Experiments.  I am pretty happy with it so far, just need to work out some more styling issues.  I snagged the spiffy code from Couloir and bent it to my will, combining it with the excellent pages function in WordPress 1.3.x/1.5.x and voila!  Photosets.

The beauty here is that my "photoblog" utilizes the existing structure and database.  I am able to fold in comments and ratings via my rating plugin (and yes I know I am behind on releasing it... so sue me.  It is still forth-coming and trust me, when you get it it will be worth the wait... I hope) as well as picking up the benefits of a smaller, less complicated database structure.

The way I have implemented it is pretty elegant I think, and the effects are nice.  Let me know what you think of it, pros and cons, so I can continue to refine it.