Thread

Right, I am currently working on my second EE site, so, newbie question ahoy!

I have a ‘Galleries’ landing page that links to three separate category pages, and within each are up to six sub-categories. Sub-categories are displayed as individual jQuery Fancybox galleries.

The Galleries landing page will link to these three pages:

Venue styling & marquee decor gallery
  Sub-category one
  Sub-category two

Individual product hire gallery
  Sub-category one
  Sub-category two
  Sub-category three
  Sub-category four
  Sub-category five
  Sub-category six

Event services gallery
  Sub-category one
  Sub-category two
  Sub-category three

If that made no sense click the link for a HTML version (click on Individual product hire gallery): http://www.benwellby.com/cre/galleries.php

My question is; What is the most efficient way to achieve this. Do I build three separate templates? Do I use conditionals? Do I use categories?

At the same time I would like to utilise the new EE File Manager thumbnail functionality, so my client has to only upload one image rather than one large and one thumbnail image.

If you haven’t guessed I really need a pointer in the right direction. Does anyone know of any good tutorials or docs that can help with setting up a Fancybox gallery?

Moved to Community Help forum by Moderator

Hi, benwellby.

I’m going to move this to the Community Help forum, since this really is a How do I kind of question. I’d tend to use something like CE Image to build the thumbnail image on the fly. The ability to use the generated thumbnails is still being coded, so CE Image is a lot easier to use.

benwellby, it certainly sounds manageable.  Is each photo is an entry?  Benefits of EE, there’s several ways you could do this.

Based on your static HTML version, I could see two ways to handle it.  It sounds like you’re thinking categories - I’d go that route if (a) each image is its own entry, which then means (b) and image could potentially fall into more than one category.

If that’s not the case, I would probably switch your “category” view to be an entry which contains all of those images in a matrix field.  So then Bars would be one entry with a matrix field containing your 8+ images.  Likewise lighting design would be an entry with a matrix field containing 8+photos (with captions, optionally) , etc.  Based on what i see, that’s probably how I would approach it.  Then use CE Image or ImgSizer add-on for the automatic resizing of the images on the fly within the template (or you could use EE’s native file manager to create the alternate versions from the single uploaded file - either would work.

I know that’s how a specific how-to, but more a conceptual how-to.  I hope it helps.

One template for the gallery view with some fairly simple conditionals will do the trick either way, by the way.

I managed to get this setup with a combination of your answers above: conditionals and categories, and ImgSizer. Easy when you know how.

I look forward to when the File Manager can replace the need for additional plugins like ImgSizer.

Thanks for your help guys.

Excellent. Glad to hear you got it sorted.

Cheers!