Thread

Hi All-

Thanks for the great community. I’m hoping for some advice.

I’m trying to put 196 back-issues of a magazine online as an archive. (each has 98 pages plus covers, so I’m looking at 19,000+ pages…)

I am struggling to find the best execution. Having decided to forego flash and PDFs in favor of jpegs, I cannot decide if using the gallery module is the way to go or if I should use weblogs to achieve what I want. What I want is a main archive index page, with links to each issue (no problem there). Each “issue” would be either an album (hopefully with some navigation) or the images would be fed through weblogs. It’s basically a low-rent digital magazine. (for a variety of reasons I am staying away from the various digital magazine vendors… cost and lack of ad support being the two biggest reasons).

I am also toying with not using EE to achieve this, but I have three sites tied together through MSM and I’d like this to be an EE solution.

Any ideas or opinions?

Thanks in advance.
-Paul

Hi Paul -

I’ve tried to provide a summary of the weblog or gallery module approach for a photo gallery, and much that that will be applicable to your project as well.

In your case especially I wouldn’t even think twice and would do it all with weblogs purely for the flexibility.

Mike - Thanks for the quick reply.

Ya know, I read those tutorials a few weeks back and I’m sure that’s what informed my thinking up to this point. So, Thank You.

In those you chose the gallery approach and - truth be told - I am leaning towards using weblogs. I have a few questions/issues, two big ones are:

- I wonder how I could create the right kind (heck, any kind) of navigation so a user could click back-and-forth through the pages…
- Am I correct in my understanding that I would not really be able to mass-upload via FTP all my images (again, I have 19,000 print PDFs which will be rendered as jpegs) and make this work? I would like to create the folders and images locally and then upload them, provided I could easily link to them through the code.

Any thoughts?
(and Thanks again)

-Paul

I choose the gallery approach mainly because I hadn’t covered it in a tutorial before - and it was easier being for a totally made-up site..😉

If you get this into a weblog you do have next and previous linking available.

You should be able to FTP the images up - it’s getting the weblog entries in place with the proper image names and paths that will prove to be a trick.

One possible idea is to play around with getting the content laid out in a spreadsheet or database, then use the CSVGrab plugin to pull it into EE.

Ya, my thoughts on getting this to work are to have EE read the meta-data (EXIF) and put things where they should be.

Erin-

That’s an interesting thought. How?

-Paul

Well I hadn’t worked it all the way through yet, but I had imagined uploading all the photos to the same directory, then using a batch uploader (I already have one of those) to load the data directly into the database. This module would move the files into appropriate directories as well.

After looking around some more, I notice this unanswered post.

Would someone be able to address his questions? I think the Frith St Gallery approach would be perfect—I do not know where to start.
(hate to plead like this, but I’m hoping someone could lead me/us to that “a-ha!” moment)

Thanks!
-Paul