One of my recent projects has been creating a website that is both a blog and an art portfolio. The art gallery needs to be attractive and also easy for the end user to manage; the portfolio is being moved from Flickr to the artist’s new, self-hosted website, so my goal is to provide a more professional-looking portfolio while keeping the ease of use that online photo sharing applications like Flickr offer.
To accomplish this goal, I have started working with a content management system called Zenphoto.
Zen strives to be simple and user friendly. Uploads, gallery management, tagging and categorizing are all very intuitive and could be figured out just by browsing the administrator panel. There are several themes available through Zenphoto’s website, as well as plugins for extending the function of your website.
This project is both a blog and a gallery, so I am using Zenphoto alongside WordPress to make this happen. WordPress has a great plugin that links the two admin control panels together. This way I can get to the back end of Zenphoto from a link in WordPress. It is also possible to fully integrate the two sites on the front end, though this is not the goal of my project.
In my experience, Zenphoto lives up to its philosophy, “Simpler is better.” So if you, like many people, have a large collection of digital images that you would like to make the main theme of your website, I’d recommend considering Zenphoto as your primary or secondary content management system.
