
Zenphoto
Open-source, gallery-focused PHP CMS for media websites
318 stars 129 forks last commit first released
Actively maintained
Last commit 26 Jul 2026.

Zenphoto is a standalone, open-source CMS designed for media-focused websites — primarily photo galleries but also supporting video and audio. It provides a compact admin UI, theme-driven frontends and an integrated Zenpage plugin for blogging and custom pages.
Key Features
- File-system based media management with multi-file upload and dynamic albums (saved searches).
- Native support for images, video and audio formats; integrated Zenpage for news/blogs and custom pages.
- Theme-driven frontend with many official and third-party themes; previewable via an official demo site.
- Search engine with boolean expressions, multimedia metadata handling and album/collection organization.
- Active release cycle with maintenance releases (latest 1.6.x series and recent 1.6.8 release).
Use Cases
- Photographers, illustrators and designers hosting portfolio galleries with integrated blog/news pages.
- Small media sites (film makers, musicians) needing a lightweight CMS that handles mixed media formats.
- Developers building custom gallery themes or plugins who want a file-system-first media CMS and extensible plugin hooks.
Limitations and Considerations
- Official testing and recommendations are primarily for Apache/PHP environments; non-Apache servers may require extra configuration. Server PHP extensions (GD or Imagick, cURL, mbstring/iconv, etc.) are expected and some are required for full functionality.
- The project maintains compatibility constraints across PHP/MySQL/MariaDB versions; review release notes and requirements before upgrading production installs.
Zenphoto is a compact, purpose-built CMS for creators who need straightforward media gallery management with blogging and theming capabilities. It emphasizes simplicity, file-system media handling and extensibility via themes and plugins, with active community development and an official demo for previewing themes.
Categories:
Tags:
Tech Stack:
Similar to Zenphoto
Dotclear
Open-source PHP blogging and web-publishing platform
A lightweight open-source PHP blog engine with multilingual support, themes/plugins, media manager, and multi-database compatibility (MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite).

Piwigo
Open-source web photo gallery and image management software
Self-hosted photo gallery for organizations and individuals; supports large libraries, albums, plugins, themes, permissions and a developer API.
Contao
Open-source PHP content management system based on Symfony
Contao is an open-source PHP CMS for building professional, accessible, SEO-friendly and performant websites and web applications; extensible via Symfony bundles and Composer.
Omeka
Open-source PHP platform for publishing digital collections and exhibits
Omeka is a PHP-based open-source web publishing platform for managing, preserving and presenting metadata-rich digital collections and media-rich online exhibits.

Sigal
Python-based static gallery generator
Sigal is a lightweight Python static gallery generator that builds responsive image galleries with themes, thumbnails, EXIF and video support, plus CLI tools to build and preview sites.

WonderCMS
Lightweight flat-file CMS for small websites and blogs
WonderCMS is a tiny flat-file CMS for building fast websites and blogs with in-place editing, themes/plugins, and one-click updates and backups—no database required.





