I understand X3 wasn't designed as a competitor to koken.
But now, people who used koken don't actually have many options. In the end, I suspect X3 is what most of us are gonna use. The free options are really too old, ugly, and in the end don't offer koken flexibility: why bother? the paying options are either based on an infamous blog cms that plain sucks or you can't try them before you buy, that I find a bit suspicious. Or they are outrageously expensive.
X3 is the only option that actually works: it's quite easy to set up and for the vistor it's fast and looks nice.
You should expect more of us. And since when people search for "koken upgrade/replacement" in google, more and more find testimonies of people who migrated to X3, who will in turn add top the list of testimonies. etc.
I honestly couldn't think a gallery with no database could work. I was so wrong. X3 works. If the integration with LR was really transparent, I think it really doesn't need a database. Managing everything in lightroom including folders for galleries or articles is very practical and straigtforward. The downside is in a few case different copies of the same image end on the server in different folders. Not a big deal considering how fast X3 is for the end user and how cheap storage is now. X3 displays pages at least 2 times faster than koken did... that's a big thing.
I'd still miss the keyword seach, or the intricated nested option available in koken with categories and topics accross pjhotos, galleries andd articles.
I'd still miss too the timeline page, last photos uploaded and these kind of things, but did my visitors really use those pages? not that much. I checked analytics logs, and it turns out people used my koken website mostly as they will use X3: reading articles and browsing galleries by topic.
The styler and options to display pages/folders differently are in the end far enough for me: changed one color, the fonts and folder display. Not much more is needed. It's simple and all the options actually are usable and look nice. unlike many theme that offer one thing you like and many you don't, and end chosing the lesser evil.
The only issue for me is indeed LR integration.
1) I had to buy a plugin from a guy that manages an folder structure that you can export to FTP. I just don't like it: it's really slow, and I'm pretty sure you could do something better that would fit perfectly with X3
2)
I see a possible solution here that we create a new option "[x] Copy image data to page.json". When disabled, it would ONLY use the data stored in image IPTC, and you would avoid issues when updating the image via FTP/Lightroom.
that just sounds GREAT!
Your workaround I figured it by myself. It would work for people who update a few pictures at a time in the same folder. Actually X3 works perfectly for anyone who updates one or a couple pictures at a time: the upload function workds great, managing metadata in X3 works great. For a few pictures at a time.
I allready put 2K pictures in my X3, 2K more are waiting.
When I modify a keyword, title, or anything in lightroom (let's say adding some details for a specific genus), it has consequences on many photos: I just can't manage each one individually deleting those pictures in many folders in X3 (since there is no database, the same image can be in different fodlers in X3).