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Debra’s Dynamic Gallery
January 14, 2007
I have a client that has both a public and members-only areas of their site. The original incarnation of the project in July 2005 was my first foray into blogging/CMS applications. To make a long story short, I chose a CMS solution that advertised itself as integrated with blogs, forum, and a photo gallery. In reality, this turned out to be an assortment of separate open-source apps strung together with a pretty lame user management system.
The hell began when members started changing their usernames in the forum, and then couldn’t log into the main site using their new name. Members attempted to upload 15M images to the gallery because they had no clue on how to resize photos from their digital cameras and became frustrated. As the membership was growing, the administration started to become problematic. A year later, they paid me to go back out on the web and do some thorough research on different content management systems and make a recommendation for a more robust solution.
I ended up choosing Expression Engine, and it’s pretty much rocking my world. It has an integrated Membership module and Discussion Forum which is taking care of all the user info seamlessly. I was able to get my design into templates really easily. It took some doing to figure out how to migrate all the member data and forum posts from one database to another since they’re set up differently, but I managed to do that without too much head-banging.
I had high hopes for EE’s integrated Gallery, but, once I started getting into it, I concluded that for a member-based photo sharing application, it’s not quite up to the job, mainly because I didn’t want to give several hundred people access to the back end, I didn’t want to give the users too many options, I didn’t want to violate EE’s license, and I wanted to make it pretty much idiot-proof. I could have made it work, though. It just wouldn’t have been perfect. And I really strive for perfect.
So I started thinking, why is my client trying to be in the hosted photo-sharing service?
Then it hit me.
There’s a GREAT hosted photo-sharing service out there already. It’s called Flickr. And it enables people to do all kinds of amazing things with their photos in a way that’s really, really easy. And fun. And free.
So then I thought, what if I could have a member-based photo gallery in EE, and make Flickr do all the heavy lifting? Let’s get to work.