Content Management for Art Students

July 14, 2007 3:38 PM

My sister just graduated from Parsons with a BFA in Fashion Design. I said I would help her with a website, which would basically be an art/photo gallery with a few different sections. Are there any content management systems that would work well for this type of application? Free is good, but I wouldn't mind spending a little money for something really good. She sent a couple links to designers' homepages that she liked [1 2 3 4 5]. Whatever it is will need to be PHP/MySQL (or flash) based.

The main content of the site will be a couple of photo sets similar to a flickr set, that is you just go from picture to picture with a next button. The design she wants is pretty sparse, and she's not going to need a lot of navigational elements.

posted by delmoi to computers & internet (10 answers total)

Yuck - flash websites are generally a bad idea. For example, if someone wants to link to a specific piece of her work, telling others how great it is, there's no way to link into the depths of flash website.

Gallery might work well - it's a generic image album package, but the community has all kinds of special purpose mods that you can imitate.
posted by chrisamiller at 4:33 PM on July 14, 2007

Simpleviewer and Autoviewer are both pretty good, simple ways of displaying photos sequentially.

I use Autoviewer on my website (I'm a photographer). To update it you just upload the files into a folder and go to yoursite.com/build_gallery.php and that's it.
posted by bradbane at 4:44 PM on July 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

flash = evil. i hate flash websites. for the reason that chrisamiller outlines.

a lot of blog-type software (ee, mt, wordpress, etc) come with 'gallery' type plugins. if you're familiar with any of those, you might want to look into that possibility.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 5:57 PM on July 14, 2007

Yuck - flash websites are generally a bad idea. For example, if someone wants to link to a specific piece of her work, telling others how great it is, there's no way to link into the depths of flash website.


Alas, this tends to be true, but it needn't be. There are plenty of ways around this. Unfortunately, many Flash developers don't take the time (or don't have the expertise) to implement them.
posted by grumblebee at 5:58 PM on July 14, 2007

http://www.indexhibit.org/ is free and PHP4+, MySQL 3.23+
http://www.gogofrog.com/ is free, web-based, and 3D
http://expansecms.com/ is $30 and designed especially for artists and designers
posted by pessoa at 6:30 PM on July 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

I haven't used it myself, but many of the people I know in the PHP world are totally in love with the free Drupal. It has many add-on projects contributed by the community. One you might want to look at for media support is at: http://drupal.org/project/gallery.
posted by dbateman at 6:43 PM on July 14, 2007

I'm not a big fan of flash sites in general, but the site would mostly just be shown to people while she interviews for work, not some high-traffic thing that a lot of people are going to visit, or visit more then once.
posted by delmoi at 6:56 PM on July 14, 2007

Gallery2 is free, opensource, and skinnable. Here's one I threw together for a friend in, literally, about 5 minutes.

Now mind you that he hasn't touched it in a long time, and that it doesn't look particularly attractive because he never told me what he wanted changed about it. It's worth looking into though. You can add artist info pages, etc w/ little to no trouble.
posted by TomMelee at 8:07 PM on July 14, 2007

If you want an easy-to-launch content management system, have you considered a blog CMS like Moveable Type? You don't have to have comments if you don't want and you can design it to look very unblog like. Your management system will already be built for you.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 3:46 AM on July 15, 2007

Taken: I'm not sure MT does galleries.
posted by delmoi at 11:24 PM on July 15, 2007