Text content: WordPress
The site’s appearance and text content are managed by WordPress. While its best-known use is for blogging, I’m also using its Pages feature for article-style pages like this and for the photo galleries.
The underlying WordPress theme is a heavily-customised version of SRS’s “Arjuna“. Renamed “Connemara“, my theme adds alternative page layouts, but its biggest customisation is the addition of picture galleries powered by a second content management system, SlideShowPro Director….
Photographs: SlideShowPro Director
SlideShowPro Director is a content management system designed for pictures and video and gives me greater flexibility and provides a slick, fast workflow:
- Upload hi-res JPEGS to Director – in my case directly from Lightroom
- Director builds thumbnails and large images
- Director adds any watermarking and sharpening
- Alternative Flash, HTML and mobile versions of my site
- Public and private “contact sheet” galleries
- Smart albums like New Photos automatically display the latest pictures I’ve uploaded
WordPress – Director integration (nuts and bolts)
The photo galleries, or text+picture pages like this, are all WordPress “pages”. Each page has a custom field value which contains the album code for SlideShowPro Director. The page is displayed using a custom WordPress page template which retrieves that album code (using the get_post_custom_values function) and sends it as a parameter to a PHP include file which calls Director’s API. This adds images to the page, and builds the thumbnail grid with CSS and links to the Lightbox JavaScript. I do love my PHP.