Creating a Great Art Gallery Archive in a Mediocre CMS
July 15, 2014 5:46 AM Subscribe
I am looking for a good solution for publicly archiving a large collection of pictures within a somewhat limiting CMS.
I am the web content administrator for a community college. We recently moved over to a new CMS and there is enough grumbling from faculty and staff about it that I want to do everything really well in an attempt to silence critics. One challenge I am having is our art gallery. On the old site, they had about 12 years of archived pictures from past exhibits. It is a neat mix of curated exhibits and talented local/high school artists. I don't want to lose it, but I also don't want to just throw it up on the website without having a useful way of displaying the collection.
We are using a forked version of Liferay for creating public higher ed sites. The whole thing is a little jerry-rigged but it does do what it needs to for most tasks. I can deploy some JavaScript and custom CSS if I need to, but that would not be ideal. I'm looking for an interesting idea beyond just making 12 pages for 12 years and then placing the pictures in tables.
I am the web content administrator for a community college. We recently moved over to a new CMS and there is enough grumbling from faculty and staff about it that I want to do everything really well in an attempt to silence critics. One challenge I am having is our art gallery. On the old site, they had about 12 years of archived pictures from past exhibits. It is a neat mix of curated exhibits and talented local/high school artists. I don't want to lose it, but I also don't want to just throw it up on the website without having a useful way of displaying the collection.
We are using a forked version of Liferay for creating public higher ed sites. The whole thing is a little jerry-rigged but it does do what it needs to for most tasks. I can deploy some JavaScript and custom CSS if I need to, but that would not be ideal. I'm looking for an interesting idea beyond just making 12 pages for 12 years and then placing the pictures in tables.
Response by poster: Will not thread sit, but I should say I was using the tables thing as an example of a very bad idea.
posted by coreywilliam at 6:18 AM on July 15, 2014
posted by coreywilliam at 6:18 AM on July 15, 2014
Okay, so do you want to archive it, preserving it as it currently is, or provide catalogue-style access to the data and images from these past pages?
If it's the former, then perhaps just rendering them as static HTML pages and hosting them would be appropriate.
If it's the latter - well, then it depends on what the data is, but perhaps storing the images in a set of galleries with proper metadata and a proper search system might do the trick?
posted by Magnakai at 6:29 AM on July 15, 2014
If it's the former, then perhaps just rendering them as static HTML pages and hosting them would be appropriate.
If it's the latter - well, then it depends on what the data is, but perhaps storing the images in a set of galleries with proper metadata and a proper search system might do the trick?
posted by Magnakai at 6:29 AM on July 15, 2014
This thread is closed to new comments.
Tables? Tables? Why would you do this? A photo gallery is not tabular data. What about something like this? (Responsive, CSS based.)
posted by DarlingBri at 6:10 AM on July 15, 2014