I need a FREE CMS for some Portfolio websites for Photographer/Artististic clients… Whats a CMS that has the best option for the Gallery part of the website? Needs to be user friendly and easy for clients to understand…
Looking for suggestions other than Wordpress, Modx, CMS Made Simple, Drupal, and Joomla… just want to try something new (:
If you really want to get fancy try DotCMS (Java based). Other than that, any CMS can be made to do what you want, some will just require more customization than others.
Hmm I’m not too familiar with that CMS… I took a look at it but ill have to browse the forums some more. for what I’m lookin for is there any CMS that makes it easier than others? maybe one that comes with a gallery module that makes what I want easy or something like that… I don’t have too much PHP experience so wouldnt be able to customize it by adding the functionality to some of the CMS options… just looking for a simple/user friendly way to do this 1 page so I can start building these sites for friends
If you’re just looking for a gallery portion (in other words, the rest of the site isn’t content managed), then why not just keep it simple and take a look at any of the multiple gallery scripts available. A CMS may be overkill for your purposes.
Well you’re #2 request should be simple. Any CMS should be capable of doing that even if you have to write a little jQuery so that links under a specific criteria (a img, or a.some-class, etc…) are handled by a lightbox extension or something like that. So in that case you’re link is pointed at the big picture but when you click the link, jQuery + a Lightbox plugin take over and instead of completing the request, they create a lightbox to display the image. If you used a special class to activate the jQuery you could make any page a “Portfolio” page by linking thumbnails to their larger counterparts and giving the links a class of “portfolio” or whatever you decide to use as the trigger.
For your #1 request you can also use pretty much any modern CMS. Although you’ve indicated that you want to try something different I would say Drupal 7 (which is a different Drupal than earlier versions) can definitely pull this off with the help of the Media Gallery Module. You’d need Media Gallery, Media API + File Entity and then to really make it shine, add the Plupload integration module so you can drag-n-drop files into the upload field (you can grab multiple files, drop them in the upload field and upload them all at once). You can have as many galleries as you like and rearrange the order of the images by dragging them around (a bit like Facebook Galleries). You can create as many portfolio sets and arrange them in a grid.