Topic awaiting preservation: All I Want Is a Cool Web Site

Is that too much to ask?

Problem is, my technical skills lag behind my creativity the way Appalachia lags behind technical skills.

I started with WordPress for my blog and Gallery for my photo gallery, and planned on basic static pages for everything else, but trying to tie things together was getting hairy and I was beginning to dread the thought of keeping all the styles uniform.

So I thought I'd take the plunge and learn a content management system. I chose Drupal partly for its numerous recommendations and its supposed flexibility, and partly because it seemed to have the most reliable module for integrating Gallery.

After three days of working with it, however, I'm nothing but frustrated. I've got installed just fine, but tying information together the way I want is beyond me. I've researched the possibility of trying something else, but it looks as though Drupal is still the best choice for everything I'm going to want to do; I'm just not smart enough to use it.

Is anyone here a Drupal wiz? Is anyone here a Drupal wiz looking for a project to help out with? I'm not sure what I could offer in exchange, but maybe we could work something out. A signed copy of Weird Texas, perhaps? I hear it's worth some good money!

hmmm i uses Mambo for my site perhaps it is what you are looking for ..its extreemly easy to set up and modify have a look ati it www.digitalwright.net as for Drupal im sorry i cant help you there

Actually I've spent a lot of time with different CMS's and ended up using drupal as well. I'm just getting into it however.

First I found they all install fairly easily.

Wordpress was good for blogging and pretty easy to skin. however I wanted something that had a bit more than a blog, I want to have a place for putting code and some other stuff.

Mambo has a simple install and is very full featured but I found the admin screens to be a nightmare and I never really figured out what was going where.

Drupal seems to be the best solution for me right now. Simpler admin interface and fairly straightforward. Biggest issue I've run into so far is that the admin screens are the same "theme" as the website and I hate that, the design I want to use isn't conducive to an admin screen. I've found a way to use a different skin for some of my admin screens but it's far from complete.

I figure I've got about a month of part-time tweaking before I have it in a way I like it.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

yup thats nice with mambo the admin never changes and with a bit of looking around you find get round with the aquard admin interface. what i realy like is it is easy to skin and easy to add other things like modules ..havent added my own code yet though so i dont know how good it is for that

Maybe you could look at zenphoto for your pictures, this looks very promising to me. Cmsmadesimple could do the trick for the cms part. The link goes to the opensource cms demo page since the cmsmadesimple homepage seems to be down at the moment. Both evolve some CSS hacking to personalize and make them poart of your site. But this should not be a very big problem.

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:: Develop yourself, develop your life, develop the world ::
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(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 12-29-2005 12:03)

Well, for a sidenote here; How are you looking to tie things together Wes? What navigation form and such? Got some mockups, perhaps? Share, SHARE I tells ya!


Justice 4 Pat Richard

Unfortunately, I don't have any mock-ups just yet. I've been trying desperately to get some sort of structure in place first. I think the look will be fairly simple to begin with; I'll nifty it up as I get spare moment.

Zenphoto looks good for a fairly simple gallery, but I'm pretty set on Gallery (I really hate that name). It's quite robust and does almost everything I need. Plus, someone's recently finished a commerce module for it. And as soon as someone works the IPTC/EXIF data into the database so it can be searched and mapped to title/description fields, it'll be just about perfect.

CMS Made Simple does indeed look simple. I'm going to take a closer look at that. I still plan to forge ahead with Drupal, hoping it will soon "click," but if I fail completely, CMSMS might just win out.

By the way, bd, I saw your new site. Looks like you got a hell of a lot further than I did with Drupal. I'm still trying to figure out how to use flexinodes properly for my blog.



(Edited by Wes on 12-29-2005 20:09)

The cmsmadesimple website is back online and i found this module for intergrating gallery2 into cmsmadesimple: G2mod. More modules could be found here and here
An comparison about Gallery1 vs Gallery2 can be found here
enjoy

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:: Develop yourself, develop your life, develop the world ::
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