I have a client who would like a photo gallery of kitchen designs on the website I am building them.

This gallery requires two important aspects:

1. Relate the photo to a designer, so that under each photo, there would be a link such as “view other designs by this designer” and “view this designer’s profile”

2. Submit each gallery photo to multiple gallery. Reading through the docs for the gallery module, it doesn’t look like it’s possible to allocate a gallery entry to multiple categories, as you can with weblog entries?

What would be the best way to achieve these? would Solspace’s GX2 module help?
Any advice greatly appreciated.

I guess I would use the regular weblog module rather than the gallery. Two weblogs, designer and images. The designer weblog would have fields for all the profile info. The image weblog would have a related field for relating to the designer. When you want to display all images by a designer, you’d then use the reverse_related entries tag to pull all the images related to that designer.
As far as an image assigned to multiple galleries, I’d use categories for that.

I totally agree with PX on this one Best way to do image galleries in my mind is always with the weblog module. Sure you miss out on a couple of the features that the Gallery Module has built in such as bulk upload and so on but the extra power and flexibility you get from using the weblog module in my mind more than covers this loss.

Also don’t forget about the excellent Tag Module from Solspace or Simple Tags by another one of the users on this forum. Both could help out with what you are doing too.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks for the replies guys. Ive been looking at Mark Hout’s File extension, so I can use the weblog approach, but it doesn’t give much control. I’m currently working on fixing up the Easy Gallery extension, which i found floating around in the forums. Almost there now.
Its a good module, allows me to upload multiple images, resize, create thumbs on the fly, and write captions (which mark Hout’s extension lacked).
Therefore, its a simple matter of being able to upload the ‘gallery’ images and use categories is normal.

The only problem I can foresee is linking to a member. Its easy enough to use the related entries tag, but how can I relate to a member as opposed to an entry. I could do a drop-down list - or - I could write an extension to pull designers names from the ‘designer’ member group…... hmmmm…  begins rant..

Hm- I’d have leaned toward Px’s approach as well.  And I still do.  But if the designers are only going to be in there as members- I might consider a custom field to hold a gallery cat id- and then pull back the gallery photos via a query.  Tagging also offers possibilities.  Might could tag the gallery entries with the relevant designer screen names- then pull them back that way.

But yes- not really an ‘out of the box’ method on this one.  I’m going to go ahead and shift to ‘How to’, as this is more ‘brainstormy’.

Uhhhh…You didn’t mention that the designers would be members and you want to tie to that info. It’s all in the details.
Personally, I’m not sure I’d tie into that data as the main source for the designers. I think using a weblog has far more options and would be easier and more flexible.

Yes, sorry I forgot to mention that point about the designers being members. But the only functionality they will be able to do is update their own personal profile. Ive written a module for that, which automatically generates a weblog entry for their profile, and adds first name and last name field in the back end member form. I find the bio field for members a little restrictive, as they can’t use formatting etc. This way I use SPAW editor (awesome editor BTW, so much better than tinyMCE) for the formatting, and it also means I can use the saef for the designers to edit their profile.

Heres the way I will be achieving this:
1. Member profile weblog entry automatically generated when registering a new member to the ‘designers’ member group by the administrator. Custom module I made a few months ago.
2. Member drop down field added to the ‘gallery’ weblog. Only the site administrator can enter into the gallery.
3. Using the easy gallery module, custom hacked and greatly simplified, to add a gallery to an entry.
4. Using Monoslideshow to present the galleries
5. Custom module to drive the xml when viewing a entry with a gallery.
6. Custom module to drive the xml when requesting all entries in a category (segment 2 is the cat_url_title) as one gallery.
7. Custom module to drive the xml to present all entries assigned to a particular designer and present as one gallery (segment 2 is the designers name, first_last).
8. weblog:categories tag to output a list of categories (kitchen styles) linking through to the gallery using (6) above.
9. below each gallery a) More designs by this designer b)more designs in this category c) other categories for this design.

something like that anyway.