Art CMS

[Dan Potter]

Hey guys, I dunno if this is an appropriate question for this forum (since it's not really Mac specific) but I figure any traffic is good traffic on iDevApps right now ;)

To make a long story short, I'm looking for a replacement for this:

http://www.allusion.net/art/

My desire is to somehow combine that with my regular blog, which is running on WordPress. All it really needs to do is have a reasonable gallery browsing type system, with the ability to attach bits of metadata to it as necessary (e.g. medium) and put it in categories. An attractive front page spread is nice but probably not totally essential.

Failing that, does anyone know a good way to apply a generic CMS front-end to a random normalized database? It's really sad, I wrote the user front-end for this art thing ages ago and then never wrote an admin interface for me to use to post things in it. So I currently have to use manual SQL insert statements to get the new stuff in there :o, and it's a bit of a pain. We actually wrote something kinda like this for a day job a couple of jobs back, but I don't fancy rewriting that again...

I started making a nice front-end with CoreData that does the image scaling and cropping and everything, but I got sidetracked.

[Carlos Camacho]

>Hey guys, I dunno if this is an appropriate question for this forum
Your post is fine.

I would recommend that you take some CMS demos for a test drive at:
http://opensourcecms.com/

My quick list of CMSs to check out would be:
xaraya.com
drupal.org
jetbox.streamedge.com

All three offer APIs/framework for extending the basic functions of their CMS.

As an artist, you might want to check out the Digital Darkroom CMS:
netautor.com
It sits on top of a framework called NetAutor, a German project. (English pages available on the site)
Visually, it looks VERY nice, very Mac-ish, though I admit to having problems installing the CMS.

For a less programming approach, there is Mambo CMS (mamboserver.com), which should have two or so gallery components. You can also run a third party gallery script in an iframe.

Expression Engine, while costing $$, isn't too expensive, and very nice. It was based on pPublish. You can find it at pmachine.com. It makes very good looking sites, and is a bit Blogish in its approach. Speaking of which, MovableType would also be an option.

I hope this helps!

[Steven]

I have heard good things about Coppermine. Haven't used it myself extensively, though...

[Dan Potter]

Thanks for the informative post Carlos. :)

I did check out that opensourcecms site a while back, to find WordPress. I'm pretty happy with WP at this point so I don't want to switch off to something like Drupal for the whole site (I actually tried Drupal first and didn't like it as much).

I'll take a look at the other CMSes you listed though. Might find something I can ... make use of ... *rubbing hands together* :gasp: :)

[Dan Potter]

Well, after looking through a bunch of this and actually trying out Coppermine, I think I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with my current system and add a little manual CMS of my own. I hate writing the same stuff over and over again but it seems like everything out there is either way overblown for my needs, or not quite a perfect fit, etc...

What I'll probably do is integrate it with WordPress by replacing the news box with a list of blog posts in my Art category, and maybe have it display the matching blog post (and a link comment) on each picture. That's more or less what I had in mind before.

I've got a couple of these sorts of integration hacks which I ought to post up somewhere when I get time. I've got one for my game company front page (cagames.com) which sucks posts out of our phpBB for the front page news.

[Carlos Camacho]

I was playing around with DarkRoom (Netautor) some more yesterday and I REALLY think it would be sweet for art-type people. You can assign meta data to your content.

[Dan Potter]

Google isn't turning anything up on netautor.com for "digital darkroom" or even "darkroom". Are you thinking of "Digital Workroom"?

[Carlos Camacho]

So sorry!

http://www.digitalworkroom.com/

[Dan Potter]

Ahh cool :) Thanks, I'll check it out too.

[Dan Potter]

Failing that, does anyone know a good way to apply a generic CMS front-end to a random normalized database?

FYI, it looks like Ruby on Rails might be a good way to accomplish this:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html?page=3

It's not quite zero effort to apply it to a random database, but about as close as you can get.

Now what'd be a really killer app is if you could use something like this to specify how you want your application to behave, and it could generate a PHP site out of it. Seems like it should be possible for very simple cases anyway (i.e. the ones that just need declarations of behavior rather than custom per-request code).