Hi,
While very bulky, one of the reasons why I like TikiWiki is its collaborative environment in creating a site and its very sophisticated permissions system, especially for the "wiki" pages. Tikiwiki, aside from being a :wiki" also has both file and image galleries. However, the photogallery component is not as sophisticated as Coppermine or other stand-alone photo galleries program.
I must admit that I have just begun to explore the "Groups" and "Albums" administration of CPG -- but I hope it will follow the more complex fine tuning of permissions being developed in "wiki" and "forum" softwares, of course adopted for photo gallery administration.
In a more collaborative environment for example, I hope eventually to share the administrative work with quite a few people. However, when I look at what I could do as an Administrator, it is amazing how I can erase the content of an entire album with just one click. Or erase the work of others for that matter. etc., etc.
The way I envision to delegate administrative functions therefore in such a large undertaking would be to find tune what duties are delegated to sub-administrators -- not so much only into limiting what sites they can administer but also what they can do.
For example, they could be grouped as editors, community leaders, curators of specific categories, etc. Some may serve to have powers like approving registered members, deciding what photos are accepted within their sphere of influence. The editors may function as the name says, to edit the text that would go with the photos, etc.Curators may decide to spearhead the creation of specific categories within their own expertise, much like what curators do in museums and galleries.
None should have the omnipotent power of the overall administrator even in the categories that they administer.
As an overall Administrator though, once a photo has been accepted by the category administrator, I would be hesitant to wield the power to "delete" any photo in the archived approved photos, let alone allow the current feature in CPG to be able to delete the content of an entire Album. This power must be at the discretion of the main administrator (or perhaps a select few) but not even the sub-administrator to decide on his/her own.
One way of doing the process systematicaly would be just like in the initial steps during the submission process, but this time, the object would be to prune the archive to a manageable level by removing redundancy or those that were not as good as the newer additions, if any. In this reverse process, the Category or Album administrator has the power to accept of reject submissions, the next stage would be for them to recommend to the main Administrator the deletion of already "previously approved" photos already in the database of a category or an Album.
Since that may be too much work for the overall Administrator, it may be done through a concensus committee, with some archival to ensure that if there was any mistake, there is an archive to fall back to.
It would have been ideal to have a "wiki" like system for the text, whereby copies of the historical versions of the text would be stored but this might be asking too much for CPG in the near future. [In the interim, what I will try to do though is sort of marry the two features, so that the comments and text are created in a wiki page, with the photo based on the CPG and other features assocated with CPG that are now not possible with any wiki.]
cgc0202