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Easy WYSIWYG with custom Template creation and maybe even CMS?

Asked by Glassed Silver,

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Grand Master

Glassed Silver

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Heya guys!

I'm currently in the process of building my own photography website.

To be honest though, I'm more of a photographer and less of a web coder.

Is there any easy or medium level WYSIWYG software for the Mac/cross-platform?

I actually need to be able to create my own templates, so stuff like RapidWeaver is nothing for me, I guess.

(Let alone iWeb)

CMS is gold bonus, but I could really use it well, because I want to integrate a blog in it. (otherwise its iframe time, I would like to circumvent iframing)

Shop function is silver bonu, but for that I would also feel comfortable about creating a sub-domained page that I'd just run as a seperate one. (external linking)

My server basically has it all:

PHP5, MySQL, etc... :)

Thanks a lot guys!

Glassed Silver:mac

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Grand Master

Cupcakes

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Honestly, your best bet is to look at WordPress and utilize one of the MANY themes that are out there for budding photographers.

ThemeForest has a bunch of photography focused themes that you'd be able to just upload, customize a bit and then have your own gallery/portfolio setup rather quickly. WooThemes (pricier though!) will have some options too but might require a little more customization (that you might not be capable of) to make your photos the spotlight.

If you want to stick with free, you can venture through WordPress' official theme repository.

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Grand Master

Glassed Silver

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  On 10/12/2010 at 10:18, Cupcakes said:

Honestly, your best bet is to look at WordPress and utilize one of the MANY themes that are out there for budding photographers.

ThemeForest has a bunch of photography focused themes that you'd be able to just upload, customize a bit and then have your own gallery/portfolio setup rather quickly. WooThemes (pricier though!) will have some options too but might require a little more customization (that you might not be capable of) to make your photos the spotlight.

If you want to stick with free, you can venture through WordPress' official theme repository.

Hmmm... WordPress is something I already digged into, and actually I'd love to not use it. MAYBE I'm going to use it for a blog, but I'm still not too sure about it.

  On 10/12/2010 at 10:24, njlouch said:

Also: Title - "custom" - not "costume".

"Costume" means clothing, dress-up, etc

Oops, why did I typo there? :laugh:

Glassed Silver:mac

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Grand Master

Cupcakes

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  On 10/12/2010 at 10:31, Glassed Silver said:

Hmmm... WordPress is something I already digged into, and actually I'd love to not use it. MAYBE I'm going to use it for a blog, but I'm still not too sure about it.

If you're not going to use WordPress (or another CMS) and you're going to rely on WYSIWYG then you won't have much luck at all. You'd be best off using something like Picasa or Flickr to manage your photos and nix any idea of having it as something more personal and unique.

WordPress isn't just for "blogs," it can be used for just about anything these days.. Just think that with what you posted, going with a CMS that has themes/templates already done for you would be the best thing. Unless you plan on jumping into a bunch of code (which judging from your post, I don't see that happening...)

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Grand Master

Glassed Silver

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What I need is my own theme. I already have a concept lying on my desk and call me whatever you like, but I'm not going to get rid of that concept. :D

Picasa is a joke, really.

Flickr is something that I will use as well, but it really is not replacing a dedicated website, seriously. :wacko:

1st way:

So basically, yes, I do need a theming from scratch.

If it can't be helped really, I am willing to dig a bit into code, as long as I don't need to write PAGES of it. :)

2nd way:

Really, CMS is just candy, if it's going to get that much of a dirt track with CMS, ignore that, I'll just iframa my blog later on then. :)

Glassed Silver:mac

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TFindley

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I did exactly what you're after about 8 months ago:

www.alopexproductions.co.uk

The portfolio is pulled from two places. the top section is a locally stored set of photos (these are on there until I get a better range of photos to upload into the next section). The bottom set are pulled directly from Flickr using a plugin (there is one small bug with this at the moment which seems to link one set back to a post I made, though the developer has assured me he's looking into this bug).

The theme was customized slightly from the standard, certain CSS bits altered slightly, but its the standard piano black theme. (the black theme gives a lightbox style effect for all the photos, and because the site design is rather monocrome, photos stand out better)

Another good wordpress example is my personal site which has been going for about 2 years: www.tfindley.co.uk

If you PM me I'll provide you with plugin details for each bit of the site and any other information that you might need :)

Not wanting to hijack the thread, but any feedback would be appreciated :) feel free to PM me with any

Hope it helps a little

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Grand Master

Glassed Silver

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  On 10/12/2010 at 10:55, njlouch said:

On my old blog, I used to store my photos on Flickr in set, and then reference these - being able to use the VERY NICE flickr API and pull them in as needed.

Try that?

I want to create a serious photography website PARALLEL to flickr, so actually, that is what my blog mainly will feature, but not my website in general.

But thanks for suggesting that I came up with after hours of thinking how I'd deploy a blog (I knew I wanted to, but didn't know how. Because blogs are like business cards these days :D)

Glassed Silver:mac

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Guest

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Posted

Some nice free wordpress themes here:

http://wpshower.com/

It's easier to rework an existing theme to fit what you want than you'd expect.

To do it from scratch, there are some frameworks:

http://codex.wordpre...heme_Frameworks

http://www.webdesign...s-grid-systems/

http://www.blueprintcss.org/

A list of alternative portfolio CMS' that I have bookmarked too:

http://www.pixelpost.org/

http://berta.hungry.lv/

http://grabaperch.com/

http://www.concrete5.org/

http://surrealcms.com/

http://pulsecms.com/

http://unify.unitinteractive.com/

http://thesecretary.org/

http://4ormat.com/

http://pinaxproject.com/

Virb, the facebook/myspace/twitter wannabe has also recently changed their site and direction totoally, to being a host+cms for "creative people" (payed for)

http://virb.com/

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