There has been some talk about Douglas Bowman‘s Gallery templates. (Go see them for yourself, if you don’t know what I’m talking about. They’re beautiful.) As I have mentioned before, I had been toying with the idea of porting them to EE (they were made for MT + 15 plugins, initially) for some time.

As a wedding gift, I created a gallery based on these templates. I am not quite finished yet, but so far rather pleased with the results, and thought I’d share them if anybody is interested.

I limited myself to EE Core, so neither the Gallery nor the Query module were available. I created a new weblog named “photos”, with two additional custom fields, namely “Filename” (text field) and “Orientation” (drop down, “Landscape” and “Portrait”). Each photo is an entry in the photos weblog, the title being the title of the photo, the body serving as description.

Go see it in action here, then download my templates here, if you like. You will also need the original templates, especially the artwork (.psd files). Parts of the template are in German, but you should be able to figure it out.

Again, this is not a full port (yet), so use at your own risk. There is only a single gallery at this moment, for example. Also, it’s not working with Internet Explorer, but I haven’t been able to quite figure out why yet. Still, it might save you some time if you implement these templates yourself.

I’m happy to answer any further questions you might have. Once the port is complete, I’ll update this thread, and publish it on EE Designs if The Linguist wants me to.

EDIT: One more thing, it requires phpThumb to create thumbnails on the fly.

Very, very cool Ingmar. Thanks for doing this for the community!

Cool.

When you do the full port, are you going to make use of some of the full EE tools available? (not just limiting it to EE Core?)

Also, is the new “photo” blog a hard requirement?

Well, what “full tools” do you mean? I could’ve used the Query module, but since I did it with “pure PHP”, it should run on all versions of EE, ie Core and Personal/Commercial. I suppose you could replace that, but there’s not much use, really. Whatever runs on Core runs on the full version, just to be clear.

The other potentially available tool would’ve been the Gallery. I like the gallery, but since in many regards it is not as full featured and flexible as the weblog module, many (including myself this time) build their “galleries” around the weblog rather thant the gallery module. This works fine, although you do need a dedicated weblog for that, and miss out on the gallery image manipulation features etc.

This answers my questions.  Thanks.

I’m interested why you required to use a custom field for orientation.. surely

Would automate this overhead?

I don’t remember the exact reason, to be frank. Obviously, wherever (width > height) = landscape, and vice versa.