Good evening,

Please bare with me while I attempt to explain my situation.

I would like some advice as to what combination of Solspace/EE functionality would work best to accomplish my end goal, which is..

---- Site Summary ----

This will be a toy gallery page.

The first page will have a listing of a few of the most recent gallery entries. (thumbnail image, title, link to full gallery)

After selecting a gallery, a new page/template will be loaded, showing thumbails of all images in the entry, title, short description, other custom fields such as owners email address, site URL, etc.

Depending on what page you are, main page or sub page, the right column will a) show a list of all categories with the number of entries in each category) or b) show titles/links to entries in that same category you are currently in. I do this right now by using a little SQL statement someone wrote on the EE forums, which does the job. I am hoping that this can still be used if I go with gallery extended (it uses weblog:categories, or weblog:category_heading) modules.

---- Site Structure ----

The main photogallery will be handled by me. I will be uploading 10-15 images of a certain toy, with some information (description, title, etc) No one else will be able to add images to this (for now, but i would liek to integrate this gallery with the below)

I have 3 other photo galleries which I would like to be user powered, ie, upload their photos with their name, email address, and images. (1 or many) The three other galleries would be Repaints, Collections, Displays.

I would liek people to be able to choose which category their image falls under, and if it falls under more then 1 category, allow them to select more then 1 category.

As for displaying the user submitted galleries, I don’t plan to categorize them, other then by repaints, collections, displays. etc. So you would click on displays, and see all entries listed under displays, doesnt matter who submitted this. Also, I want it to be public, wheather that means just using a guest accoutn for people to log into, or one not at all.

This is a big project for me, a little out of my normal scope of projects, so I am somewhat unsure as to how I might lay this out, or the best way atleast.  right now I am usign some photo gallery plugin that allows me to relate 1 weblog entry, to a photo set in a category, which sor tof works, but I seem to be doing a lot of redundant work for something that i believe can be alot simpler.

in theory, I’dl ike to be able to use 1 or 2 photogalleries, category functionality in the main photo gallery (about 12-15 categories), and then the user powered galleries and my main gallery to be integrated into eachother so I could dispaly entries from both on the main page.

this probably is not clear, so if you need anymore information before giving me advice, fire away, i’m sure i’ve missed some staple bits of info I should provide.

I am also unsure as to what functionality I really need, gallery extended 2? solspace file upload? solspace free form? normal ee stand alone form?

Please help, thank you!

I forgot, are there any real world examples of photogallery extended I could take a look at?

http://community.phvx.com/ then go to the vanguart section.

Hey Briggs_ca,

My apologies for taking so long to reply.

I think you’re best approach is something like the following:

The galleries that you as site editor create should be in a weblog. That will give you the flexibility you need to capture all those fields and such.

The user submitted galleries should use GX2 since the data you’re capturing is lesser in scope and manageable by GX2. Note something important though. I bult GX2 in a way that would make porn spamming difficult. I don’t allow non-members to submit into galleries. So if that’s essential for you then I have two things to say, you will not be able to use GX2 and you will spend all of your waking hours trying to keep porn images off of a site intended for parents and children. Seriously!

mk