X3Photo Gallery Forums

iv-admin is strictly for accessing the admin, and the folder can be renamed for branding reasons. This folder can actually be deleted (although that would server little purpose), and the gallery will still work. This is how and why the admin-folder is entirely segregated for functional and aesthetic reasons.

iv-includes are all the Imagevue core files, scripts, templates and assets which makes the entire Imagevue ecosystem tick. This folder should normally never be touched.

mabro wrote:The branding and the aesthetic reasons still elude me.
Except, perhaps, when one develops for a third party and one does deliver the admin that this admin-directory needs a fancier name...

Some licensed users are setting up galleries for photographers, and they wish to have the white-label the Imagevue admin. In the old Imageuve X2, you could not rename the "imagevue" folder. Now, we renamed it to "iv-admin" by default, and you can simply rename it from FTP without any complications. If we did not separate iv-includes from this folder, users would not be able to rename the folder because there are dozens of paths to JS, css, php, swf, img files in the iv-includes folder (which can not be renamed). Therefore they are separated.

Also, we hope to be able to provide new entirely separate frontend galleries in the future. These may be developed by us, or by 3rd parties. In the case of 3rd parties, they will be able to use the API to create the gallery/website frontend, and the admin can be used to manage the gallery. It may be a benefit to be able to white-brand the admin from this perspective.

mabro wrote:The reason for my questioning is that I want to have a temporary test-gallery on my site.
I thought that this test-gallery and the production-gallery would have to share the same iv-includes directory.
But this is not the case, they both have a copy of the iv-includes directory on their own locations.

I don't know why you thought they would have to share the same iv-includes directory. Even if they could, what would be the benefit of this? just like wordpress, when you install it in a separate folder, it is a separate entity with separate files. It's not like the files take a lot of disk space anyway, and they are not to be edited. I don't really see any problem ...

We're moving towards iv-config folder where all user changes will be stored.
So updates will be as painless as possible, just overwrite iv-admin/includes and you're set.