Wordpress as an Online Gallery Platform
Posted by Wilk | Filed under webdev
For this gallery, I basically had two choices, Wordpress and Joomla. I say two choices because those are the two free open source platforms for such a purpose that are best of breed and that I know intimately. I sided on Wordpress for several reasons.
First, it’s fast. Joomla is fairly fast, but adding the bells and whistles can slow it down to some degree, and I wanted a site that was fast. The main reason I felt speed is an issue is that important because the plugin set that I chose for viewing the pictures individually is Lightview There are several "Light" plugs that give you the neat ajax pop-up display, I chose Lightview because the site for the main part of the plug shows many different uses and gives code examples. I chose that mainly because I chose to show my panos in zoomify as highres originals. Panos are great but they are postage stamps online compared to the huge amount of pixels in the original. Since I have a lot of space on my server, I decided to give viewers a shot at easily seeing the full high res original, and zoomify is the only reasonable choice for that imho. That presentation has to be contained in an html page, and Lightview works well at presenting web pages as much as it does pictures. Zoomify also prevents the stealing of the full res panos because of the way it presents them. The site needs speed because the Lightview plug is essentially broken (does not work) until the page fully loads. You get the photo in another web page if the page isn’t fully loaded, so it’s not like the site is broken, but the Lightview display is what I prefer because it has a wow factor to it.
Second, Wordpress is very simple to install and use for those that have any experience with installing php/MySQL apps. There are several hosts that set you up with an install if you want, my server installs wordpress and a host of other apps on any domain with a couple clicks of the mouse. It is a blogging platform and has quirks associated within those parameters, but if you understand the simple methodology of how the dynamic content is displayed, it’s simple. Wordpress has two roads you can take for any part of your content—posts & pages. They are distinctly different in how they are managed by the back end and how and why the system displays them. Because I chose to blog—I love to write and have a big mouth, so of course I wanted to blog! Anyway, because of that, I decided to present the gallery in pages. Pages are static and are normally a part of the header navigation, i.e. the navigation at the top of the pages of the site. I blog with posts—that keeps both purposes of the site separate and it ends up being pretty cohesive and logical. Posts can have various categories and sub-cats and must have at least one category, because every post must be associated with one. Categories make it easy to write on different topics (like webdev in this case) and keep them grouped so the reader has an easy to understand path of navigation to your rants. Posts are chronologically sorted from the most recent first to the oldest last, which makes sense. It may not serve everyone’s purpose, but there are ways around that for those that would prefer to sort based on other criteria.
Third, while Joomla has a ton of plugins, wordpress seems to win the day in terms of the best plugins for a photo site. Case in point, the PicLens Wordpress extension is simply the best of breed when it comes to online slid shows. Built with the Flash 9 framework, it has a super slick and easy to understand interface for the end user and does FULL SCREEN slide shows, something that no other plug that I know of does. It represents a paradigm shift for displaying photos on the web to finally be able to do full screen slide shows. The pics you put up have to be sort of high res, they suggest 800 pixels wide for landscape orientation, but I am using about 1400 pixels wide and a little over 1000 pixels high for portrait photos. The results are awfully darned sharp and as a photographer, that’s what you’re going for. Because I use both Lightview and PicLens to launch the full size photos, it’s a little tougher for the average internet dolt to figure out how to steal your shots, it only took me writing the html code for my first gallery to realize how it’s done, but it can’t be done from the presentations themselves at least.
Forth, Pic a Day—Wordpress is hands down the easiest and best choice for a pic-a-day site. I have plans once I get enough photos worked to have a good stream of work to start my own on a subdomain of my current site. It’s a little more complicated to blog and do a pic-a-day from a single domain on wordpress unless you do a separate install, which is what I may actually end up doing, but having a subdomain makes it super clear to search engines and blog sites to understand that what you’re doing is a strict pic-a-day site, so a subdomain accomplishes that well, I think. I will also use a theme that accommodates a pic-a-day type site, of which there are many for Wordpress.
Fifth, blogging. Joomla has a blogging component, but it does not ping blog sites and search engines when you post a blog article straight out of the box. The blog component of Joomla, while it has a very nice presentation is not a true blogging environment like Wordpress is. Because of the pages/posts back end (as explained earlier, a page presentation can either be a page which is static or a post which more for blog entries and must be done under a category – it’s taxonomy centric). If you’re going to blog, Wordpress is hands down the choice. Blogging when done well can help garner great attention to your site that you just would not get in other ways, but it takes commitment, stictoitiveness and a reason to do it to be successful. If all I did was blather on about my day, what lenses I’m lusting after, etc. (typical photographer shop talk) it would not garner as much attention as it will. Usefulness is what people look for. If you know a thing or two about a certain subject and do well written articles about it, people normally take note, and your blog gets more attention, especially from search engines and the like.
What Joomla DOES have over Wordpress is presentation. It is by far the most useful tool for really eye catching content. Because of the structure of Joomla, you can do a multitude of different presentation layouts that Wordpress simply won’t do without a huge amount of customization.
I’ll do more writing on these issues and do some how-to’s in terms of photo-centric sites on Wordpress, and if I get the hankerin’ I may just do a Joomla project just for the heck of it. But my commitment to my photo work comes first!
Tags: internet, web development, wordpress
