Section
Information you need before starting to work with LENA.
What is LENA for? LENA (Polish: „Lekki album z łatwą nawigacją”, meaning a lightweight album with easy navigation) is a Joomla extension for creating photo galleries. In the administrator area, you upload photos, arrange them in albums and choose covers. You can display an album on its own page or insert it into an article. Visitors browse thumbnails and open enlarged photos. They cannot add, edit or delete photos — you perform these actions in the Joomla administrator area.
Supported environment LENA 1.0 requires: Joomla 5.x or 6.x; PHP 8.1 or later, subject to the requirements of the Joomla version in use; a MySQL or MariaDB version supported by Joomla; the PHP fileinfo, gd and mbstring extensions. The server must allow PHP to write files inside Joomla’s images directory and read originals while generating thumbnails. Reading the date taken and automatically correcting JPEG orientation also requires the PHP exif_read_data function from the exif extension.
Before installation Obtain the LENA installation package in ZIP format, for example pkg_lena-1.1.1.zip, and make sure the server meets the technical requirements. The public package contains three extensions: the LENA component — the photo library, albums and website views; the Content - LENA Gallery plugin — replaces an album shortcode with a gallery inside an article; the Editor Button - LENA Gallery plugin — selects an album from the article editor.
Before uninstallation Uninstalling the package removes the component, both plugins and the LENA database tables. The script deliberately leaves uploaded photos in the images directory, however, so files do not disappear automatically with the extension. Before proceeding, back up: the Joomla database; every directory used by LENA for storing photos; menu item configuration if it may be needed when restoring the website; the list of articles containing {lena album="ID"} shortcodes. !