WP overrated?

Hi John (I now have my Johns straight =)

I know you’re frustrated, but I think we need to get past the frustration if you want to move forward. It’s true that the software could sometimes be smoother, but at the same time, I’m not sure how easy you expect it to be, and no solution is going to be hassle-free.

To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt: ‘Nothing worth doing is without effort.’

So, let’s start at the beginning.

1) What do you want out of a website? Do you want people to have access to your photos in gallery/portfolio format? Or do you want to blog individual images or groups of images and write stories about them?

2) Do you want to share with friends/family? Or clients?

3) Do you use workflow software like Aperture or Lightroom? These make organizing and processing large groups of images faster. You can easily upload to services like Zenfolio. Or, you can export collections as webpage galleries and just upload them to a website via FTP. This is a pretty straightforward solution.

If you just want to post galleries, then I highly recommend you head over to Zenfolio and sign up for a trial (they don’t ask for credit card info). It is by far the easiest solution I’ve found. Quite newbie friendly because it has a slick interface. Much like the Windows explorer. There are some bells and whistles but I have found that the defaults are intelligently configured, and there’s not much you have to do. I was up and running with a really nice page within about an hour. For $60 you get unlimited hosting, a great place for the videos you mentioned, blogging, webpage creation, and your own domain name. This sounds like all that you need. Just ignore the WP issue entirely.

Have you actually tried it out? I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

WordPress has a known limitation when it comes to photoblogging. Granted, a photoblogging theme can solve the problem, but your website will no longer be a regular blog.

My solution: Install Piwigo on a subdomain and use the Piwigomedia plugin for WordPress to display the images in a WordPress page or post.

https://www.techtangerine.com/2012/01/15/piwigo-and-zenphoto-a-comparative-review/

WordPress has a known limitation when it comes to photoblogging.

Really? It all depends on your goals. Photo blogging or Photo blogging ?? If you want a blog with pictures, WordPress is great. If you want a gallery website, WP can still be great, but you have to set it up right, just like you do when for anything else.

Well, I’m BEGINNING to figure it all out. Photocrati (which, BTW, just bought NextGen Gallery) seems to be a pretty good blend of WP and photo galleries. And NextGen looks pretty slick. But I need video galleries as well. NextGen may be able to do that, I’m still trying to figure it all out. Don’t know what Photocrati’s plan for NG is but could also include video in the future – we’ll see, I guess.

I’ve looked at piwigo and zenphoto both since my ISP offers both as a “plug-in”. But they have problems of their own – and they are not intuitive from what I see. Maybe that’s why Flickr is the way it is – maybe that’s the best out there.

Although Chris’ recommendation of Zenfolio is good. Their navigation structure is the best I’ve seen, but it’s a pay-to-play site. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what I want right now – maybe in the future. I just don’t understand why it all has to be so complicated. (Like the latest version of iTunes – what the heck was Apple thinking???)

Heh. My wife took one look at iTunes and had unkind words to say.

Kartoony, what are your requirements/wish list for this? I mean, a gallery is a gallery, but you may have specific wants.

I think, and that’s my problem, I’m still trying to figure out what I want on my website and all of these little things are complicating it, what I’d like is one of those “slideshows” (on the home page) like you see on other website home pages with little buttons at the bottom showing the progress from one slide to the other. Usually the slides have text and graphics, you click them and they take you to another page. (I’m SURE this has some kind of name, but I don’t know it.)

Oh yeah, and not just on the home page. Where a “gallery” might reside inside the site, I need the ability to run video and static graphics and, perhaps, audio.

But I’ve also seen these types of “slideshows” that now contain videos, so rather than going to a different page, a video will start.

A photo slideshow is nice but slideshows now need to support all kinds of media.

I’m pretty sure MUSE will support that and, perhaps, I’m just asking too much from WP. The whole idea was to keep things simple, and I’m OK with that. I’d much rather see less features in WP than a bloated, overloaded platform that bogs down under the weight of stuff that should never have been there in the first place.

And I’m not trying to do stuff on the cheap. But if I’m led to believe that something will perform in a certain way, I want to know how to implement that and so far I’m running into problems.

What I like about WP, since my rant started a while back, is that it APPEARS to be flexible enough that, with plug-ins, I might be able to accomplish what I want. But no sooner do I figure that out when something else pops up (that I see, for example, on another site) and, dammit, I want that too!

If I haven’t said it before, the technology is beginning to change TOO FAST! I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but even I am beginning to get overwhelmed with the amount and frequency of change.

I don’t know if that helps?

OK – being the [degrading comment moderated] that I am, I have spent the last three weeks learning about WordPress, mostly from Lynda.com and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. That dude knows his stuff. I have been through the WordPress Essentials course and if I had one whit’s worth of sense, I would have gone through that before trying to jump into WP with both feet.

I should also have set up a site on WordPress.com and played around with the features there as well.

Let’s face it folks, this is not a five minute install. It’s only a 5 minute install if you know what you are doing and I clearly did NOT.

So I’ve got WP set up on my hosted service and just the other evening set up a local install on my home and work computers. I may even put an install on my MacBook Air. Once you know how to do it, it’s really is pretty darned simple.

So I have to eat some crow and answer my own question with ABSOLUTELY NOT. This is an absolutely amazing platform.