Recently, a friend asked me to help him design a new website for his photography business. and what follows is what I came across as far as designing a photographers website with as little coding as possible.
the components I looked into include and are not exclusive to the list below.
There must have been 30 or so themes and templates that I thought I could possibly use not to mention the different types of gallerys. alot of them that were very complete and detailed in their refinement but just of no use in this situation.
Some other useful site were :
extensions.joomla.orgwww.templatemonster.coma quick google search and Im sure you can find half a dozen great sites.
So the first thing to do is to begin the build in a test environment.
I recommend
APACHE2TRIAD this has been a solid performing, minimal fuss installation of Apache2.2, PHP5, MySQL5 and a whole host of other features rolled into one. the integration of the admin panel with PHPmyadmin is great and perfect for everytask ive thrown at it.
WEBSERVER : APACH2Triad Download : Mirrors here be , fi , bigpondOnce thats done I installed Joomla 1.5. I chose joomla because of the online community thats surrounds this open source system. Especially considering Ill be handing this site on to someone else to manage.
CMS : Joomla 1.5.10 Full Package Download The install of Joomla takes 2 minutes start to end.
First you should quickly go into PHPmyadmin and create a database. Then Copy the Joomla files to your Server ( anywhere you like as long as its in the htdocs and the webserver can see it )
browse to your joomla director with your browser http://localhost/{joomla directory}
This should start you on your joomla install path. Once your done, delete the Installation folder and you will be ready to use and configure joomla.
THEME : Kitephotography Download : MirrorThis theme also not as flashy or as glamorous as some others, was a nice comprimise. All we wanted was a white background to work from and this was a nice launch pad i guess.
THEME : Sea of Glass DownloadThis is an alternate design I proposed just in case the original didnt go down so well.
GALLERY : SlideshowPro DownloadDownloading this package with give you SSP, SSP director and a few other goodies to make your day. There should also be a sneaky module tucked away inthe folders for EasySSP.
Basically, this is a fully customisable Flash Gallery. With an option to recreate the Slideshow flash file in Adobe Flash with either actionscript 2 or 3. You dont need adobe flash at all. Not for creating the slideshow, nor for customizing it. Maybe if you go a little deeper it might be a good idea to use flash but not for our needs here.
GALLERY : EasySSP DownloadOk so for this you want to go into your Joomla Administrator page and install this module.
Make sure you active it properly. I recommend you read and reread the documentation supplied on the site. Admittedly there are other ways to load your Slideshow onto joomla and you may not want to use Easyssp. Another good way I found was to use the Moseasymedia module which you can download from
HERE.Configure your Param.xml with
EASYSSP Builder. This is a great online tool that lets you choose edit and reconfigure all the different settings for your slide show Gallery.
You can set your colours sizes etc and when your finished you can export all those settings in an XML file which you can load onto your site for slideshowpro to use. Just like magic your gallery is that same colour scheme as your site. This is a something that can be done in Adobe Flash when creating your slideshow from scratch.
so hopefully after installing all that you need to install and configure you should be able to see your gallery.
GALLERY : SlideShowPro DirectorFrom here you can install and configure the SlideshowPro Director onto your website.
Director needs a MySQL database to function. Note that there is also an activation key thats needed.
if you want to install ssp director without having an activation key,
just go to "ssp_director/app/controllers/components/pigeon.php" and replace line 100
"return (preg_match('/^(127.0.0.1|localhost)(:d+)?$/i', $this->baseDomain())) ? true : false;",
with
"return (preg_match('/^(127.0.0.1|localhost)(:d+)?$/i', $this->baseDomain())) ? true : true;"
now the activation key is unrequired!
when I installed the gallery I had an issue with URL locations in some of the files.
- mod_easyssp.php - loader.swf entry needs to be replace with the name of your slideshow. You May need to double check the path of the file too.
- param.xml - check the location of the images.xml file
- images.xml - check the location of your images OR if your using Director you will need to enter the link to director and set file type to 'Director'
- crossdomain.xml - you will need to enter your url in here
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