Got another print shipped out, a 13×19 this time. Black and White. Very super fab. Still working on the new photo site. WordPress is more or less working out the way I want it to despite some weird functionality issues (like the lousy sub-category implementation). It definitely does things differently than MovableType does, in both good and bad ways. I need to look into “pages” functionality for static content. Most of my site will be static with wordpress being used mainly as a CMS for easy management and templating. But portfolio maintenance and rotation is where it will really be useful.
When thinking about modifying wordpress into a photo CMS that I could offer a hosted service for, it’s clear that it would need a ton of work, or a ton of individualized service for each photographer. While conceptually it’s not hard to get your head around, the grunt work of doing it is unappealing. Here are some of the ideas I’ve been kicking around.
Page Publishing Static pages which are automatically included as menu items on front page. May include Bio, About Prints, Contact info, Testimonials or whatever.
Standard Blog In most cases this would be for publishing articles and providing a “What’s new” Page. Not the main feature of the site.
Any Permalink You Want Every entry should have a field where you can type in the url where you would like the entry to appear. WordPress will then write this to your .htaccess file. Some of this can be managed by clever categorization, but this would be much more elegant. Could also allow pointing at an entry from multiple URLS, which could have uses. Would require a hook to rewrite the htaccess file each time an entry is changed though. That could suck.
Structure Overall, it shouldn’t look like a blog at all. The front page should look like a standard photographer’s home page, (whatever that is). Essentially this means that each photographer would need either to have their current design adapted for wordpress, or get a new design done. Templates can be provided, but most photographers would probably want something more individualized. Web designers are pretty cheap these days.
User Interaction This is where wordpress really shines. Using programs like Ecto and Photon you have a solution already there for adept users. Would probably want to contract Adriaan to hack together a custom, simplified ecto for posting photos and entries.
That’s it for now.