Art website for my mom
What technology should i use for my mom’s art website?
I want to have several galleries. I want to be able to index things by attributes such as size, media, etc. I would like to have comments – threaded even. I would like to allow invited participants to update things like the date or add stories about the pieces. Might even be nice to allow invited people to submit photos or other pieces.
In the end I want to use the results of the website to create a high quality coffee book.
Oh… and anyone know anything about making a coffee table book? 40-80 page 12×12″ books cost about $75 on blurb.com. 10% discount for 10 books. So I’d probably be looking at $700 with shipping for 10 books. Anyone have any better suggestions?
you know the photos whose work we used in the iphone app had a very nice gallery system. you should ask him.
Honestly, unless you want to develop a custom system, there are only a few routes that I would recommend.
1. WordPress – Has all kinds of media features (as shown by Matt Mullenweg’s personal blog) and supports grabbing all kinds of metadata for media. Art templates using WordPress here – http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/05/10/21-premium-like-free-photoblog-themes-for-wordpress.html
2. Expression Engine – Not free, but very powerful. Probably get you what you want but there is a learning curve.
3. Drupal – Not user friendly (at least last time I checked) but really powerful.
Since you’ve got so much experience with WordPress, that is what I would go with, but maybe it is time to branch into other CMSs. Let us know what you decide!
I’m going with WP cause it’s what I know. I’m trying the YAPB plugin on WP 2.8.3 and working of the YAPB Reflection Theme
So far, the shortcomings that i’ve found are primarily to do with grouping and with additional meta.
I’ve added post meta: width, height, and year. Will also be adding location and other meta. Still need to figure out how best to group works by the series that they belong to, how to group works with close up shots, and how to set up the system to let you simply hit play and watch the gallery play.
I think it’s definitely worth revisiting the NextGen Gallery system for sorting and organizing. I’ve used it on a couple projects lately and it’s come a long way.
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