Intelligent publishing system for artists

Kosmo

This has been my dream for along time, many of you who have visited on my site may have noticed that my blog style site doesn't suite me well, I'm not a constant writer, I want a good publishing system with easy interface to publish my drawings, site designs (maybe even working site not just a picture) and so on. I don't see commenting that big of an feature that I would put it in the initial interface, but the possibility to talk about certain jobs would be neat, and further commenting on my own work would be valuable. I'm seeking a way to do this all with RoR since it might be the only way for me to accomplish this with my level of coding knowledge. But the reason I posted a thread here is that usually when you do some kind of creative work, you overlook some obvious points, so I know that there are alot of graphic designers here so just give me input about what you'd like to see in the publishing platform.

3stripe

i helped my flatmate build his site (an illustration portfolio) but now need to give it some blogish features - news stories - blogroll etc. so my plan is to try and turn the portfolio system you see at http://www.paulryding.com/folio.html into some kind of wordpress extension, and the use custom fields in Wordpress to load images into it. COMPLICATED! i'm also building a website for my mum who paints (http://deirdre-edwards.co.uk/index.php), and have spent ages integrating a php gallery into Wordpress, which got kinda complicated. WP just doesn't do images well! so yeah def. a market for a nice publishing system for artists.

Ben

For photos, there's the fantastic gallery thing created by Douglas Bowman, of stopdesign fame.

3stripe

oh yeah i'm also doing some heavyish customizing of http://slideshowpro.net/ at work to display image gallerys... lots of intersting options for linking to rss feeds

Kosmo

Ben, isn't that gallery created with iPhoto plugin called Photon? Which is basically the same as Photoshop gallery creating script, maybe tad more advanced. Anyway, I'm setting up a testbed on this machine, my Linux box is rather dead at this point - bad managing from my part - so I'm looking for something like Wamp or other to test out RoR scripts, anyone have any recommendations, the platform is Winnie. I'm also looking for an option to get the gallery going with some neat Flash script and the description and managing going on with RoR if I can integrate them both nicely enough. Seems like alot of work for the next couple of weeks and months.

3stripe

Kosmo I would check out SlideshowPro, even quickly. If you strip all of it's builtin-in navigation, you're left with a Flash-based photo unit, that can be updated manually via XML, using an add-on php control panel, via iPhoto, or a Windows script, an Automator script or a Photoshop action set, or even via a Flickr RSS feed. Phew! Maybe you could build a nice admin tool for it in RoR though?!?

Kosmo

I checked it out and it is sweet as ... well as sweet as flash photo gallery thingie can be. And I like the idea of having the option for multiple photos of your work in single thread or post. I usually like to showcase my paintings with the whole picture and few details of it to show it off. Not to mention if you work on a comic or someting. Problem being that it's not mine so I can't just take it and add it to my own script since I'm going to release it to public.

3stripe

Ah you're releasing your own system... cool :-D Ok, here's what I've been looking for on my constant search for a decent Wordpress image gallery/manager. Most do a combination of the below, but with varying degress of success..... 1. Full browser-based control. No fiddling about via FTP once installed! 2. Galleries, sub-galleries, with random or specific thumbnail preview. 3. Thumbnail view of galleries/sub-galleries 4. Large view of each image. 5. Title + Description for galleries/sub-galleries/image 6. Automatic thumbnail generator 7. Automatic pagination 8. Valid XHTML + CSS 9. RSS Feed 10. Nice choice of transition effects (This is basically the same as the eSPG list at http://www.quirm.net/show.php?contentid=4. However eSPG is buggy as hell.)

Kosmo

Ouch. Ran in to a problem. To get everything actually working in this needs some heavy tweaking and a strong knowledge on theme building, because we are not talking about fuild content like text but images, that have to be resized. Besides the basic photoblogesque elements, I haven't even figured out what else an artist needs. But I'm fairly confident that the flash main image presentation will save me some trouble IF I can figure it out.

3stripe

Double ouch. I can't help you Kosmo, sorry! Hopefully someone can though ;-)

lech

Might I suggest : http://editkid.com/EUWDPCpix/

Kosmo

You might..

giginger

I've love it if there was a gallery extension for vanilla where people could upload photos and then comments are discussions.

I'm sure it's possible but it's just not something I could do because my coding skills are nil.

lech

if someone cares to try, im fairly certain they can expand on the avatar uploader enough to suit it for full blown uploads with a max limit and a set of limited filetypes. I haven't looked into it personally, but I'm fairly certain it's possible.

3stripe

hmm could be interesting

Kosmo

Hmm... this opens a completely new window to me actually. And I like open windows, I can hop around like a cat. If the publishing system was built on top of Vanilla, I was going to have a possiblity to intergrate Vanilla to my system anyway. But if I could mold the project so that it is actually just an extension for vanilla. That would take care of the commenting system, and it would allow people to fully contribute to the threads... hmm, I have to dig deeper on this one.

3stripe

All roads lead to Rome.
All roads lead to Vanilla.

Kosmo

I was thinking that if Mark has something in his sleeve, to think about how much the new lussumo framework would help and what new things will the new Vanilla release bring.

giginger

That's what I'm hoping is his framework idea. Everything is interlinked for ease of use.

3stripe

/me hmmmms at http://lussumo.com/community/comments.php?DiscussionID=1204

Kosmo

Neat. I didn't even check that thread out since I tought that it was filebrowser related.