Tuesday 27 March 2007

Sprucing up the Joint

I've been a bit busy over the last few days changing the Galleries and Exhibitions Sections of the site. The site even includes the obligatory gradient background that all css based sites seem to have these days.

The main reason for this is that I wanted to change the way the galleries were generated. Previously I used Breezebrowser to generate the web galleries through The EOS template. There were two main reasons for deciding to change.

  • Breezebrowser is an excellent product and I use it at the front end of my workflow to sift through the images and quickly sort out the shots I don't want. The trouble is that generating web galleries is usually an end of workflow thing for me, and by the end of the workflow my images are all safely stacked away in iView Media Pro. So using iView would be a much better option.
  • The EOS template is a fantastic piece of javascript programming an for event/wedding photographers it does a great job of delivering galleries for users to buy prints from. The problem from my point of view is that all that javascript stops the site being indexed by search engines. Additionally i wanted something I could easily controll with css and minimal javascript and it was time for a change.
I decided to use the iView HTML generation technology combined with the Paypal Shopping Cart system to produce exactly what I wanted. In a future blog I will provide some instructions on how to do this yourself for those who are interested.

In the meantime here is a picture I found whilst tidying up the galleries:



Triplet

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would be interested in iview's ability to generate e-commerce pages. As an Extensis Portfolio user, I may be looking to switch.

Where can I find out more about iview support for html and paypal. Examples?

Also, does iview export a running text file from selected records?

thanks
russ@widstrand.com

Chris Shepherd said...

A good place to start would be David Beckermans article - I used a slightly different technique though.

I will be writing up my technique with example files soon.

"does iview export a running text file from selected records?"
Not sure what you mean by that - could you explain a bit more please.

Anonymous said...

Re text, something like this... select all records, command export to text file (or similiar) select fields to export and iview saves a text file with headers and data.

I currently have an ecommerce site with portfolio. looking to compare and contrast. Any experience with Extensis Portfolio?

russ

Chris Shepherd said...

Yes it will export to a text file - though for some reason they call it a text table. A rough idea of how it works can be seen here.

In addition it also exports to XML which may allow you to do many clever things with the data...or not if you don't know XML :)

Is the site Widstrand Edition, by any chance? - I just love that "Stacked Fence #2"...my sort of shot :) Unfortunately I havn't use Extensis so I can't be very much help there I'm afraid.

Looking at the site it functions in a very similar way to the gallerys here. Once I have finished my blog on how to integrate iview & paypal why not download the trial version of iview and see if it works for you.

Chris