WordPress + ProofBuddy + NextGEN Gallery

4 Feb Leave a Comment Filed Under: Opinion

After upgrading to the Developer’s Version of the WordPress frame­work Headway, I thought I should learn more about it by cre­ating my pho­tog­raphy site with it. Bob Rockefeller Photography had been run­ning on the PhotoDeck ser­vice, but I wanted to bring the whole of it – blog, port­folio and client proofing – all together on the same server. So a project was born.

The deci­sion on the plat­form (WordPress) and the frame­work (Headway) having been made, I did some research on a good port­folio system and didn’t take long to find that NextGen Gallery would more than do the trick. It is very pow­erful and adapt­able, tow­ering above the competition.

Finding a client proofing system wasn’t so easy. Many pho­tog­ra­phers use ser­vices such as PhotoDeck, PhotoShelter, SmugMug Pro and Zenfolio, which means the market for WordPress client proofing sys­tems is small. What I found were ProofBuddy (free for Lite and $150 for Pro), Photography Orders ($200), and Photo Video Store ($83). Each had their strong points and each would handle the chore, but in the end I picked ProofBuddy. I’m using the Lite ver­sion 2.0 now, but intend to upgrade to Pro when ver­sion 2.1 is released.

I had two main require­ments for the client proofing system: it had to be easy for inex­pe­ri­enced clients to use and it had to be adapt­able enough to be styled to match the rest of the site. With the blog, port­folio and proofing areas all run­ning together, they needed to look like a uni­fied whole, not three inde­pen­dent parts. ProofBuddy’s theme system fit the bill for adapt­ability – the CSS was exposed and there were tem­plate files for tweaking the HTML and PHP as needed.

While the proofing area is not flashy, it has all the pieces needed for a client to easily view their proofs and order the images they want in the sizes they need. The client gets auto­matic emails con­firming the order and on any status updates. I get emails for the orders and can manage mul­tiple clients easily from the admin­is­tra­tive inter­face. There are options for me to offer dis­count coupons and the Pro ver­sion will allow me to sell photo packages.

ProofBuddy con­nects easily to PayPal as its only pay­ment system, which is fine with me. Most of my work is local and clients pay me directly, anyway. Others may need the more variety pay­ment sys­tems offered by the other options.

In the end, I’m pleased with the results. My cus­tomiza­tions are pretty well iso­lated from Headway, NextGEN Gallery and ProofBuddy so that updates to those key sys­tems won’t require much design (or redesign) effort. Take a look at the Bob Rockefeller Photography site and see how it all came out.

Genesis 1.7 vs. Headway 3.0

13 Jan 2 Comments Filed Under: Opinion, Web Development

The good news for WordPress devel­opers is that a tremen­dous range of pro­fes­sion­ally designed and devel­oped themes exist that will let you get a site run­ning quickly. Among them are “themes” that per­haps should be referred to as frame­works because they are much more than a simple theme. These frame­works allow the designer/developer to add or create child themes that use the frame­work as their base and simply add in the look required for a given site.

The most well known of these frame­works are prob­ably Thesis, Genesis and Headway. All of them are pow­erful and each are used by a great number of pro­fes­sion­ally done sites. But they are not the same. I have expe­ri­ence with Genesis and Headway and would like to describe how they are the same and how they are different.

The Same

Both Genesis and Headway pro­vide these fea­tures in common:

  • Advance con­trol for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Personal and Developer licenses
  • Complete flex­i­bility of design using HTML, PHP and CSS
  • Well struc­tured code (espe­cially well orga­nized CSS classes)
  • Available child themes that are ready to go out of the box or that can be mod­i­fied and cus­tomized as needed
  • Available custom widgets
  • Excellent sup­port forums
  • A com­mu­nity of pro­fes­sional devel­opers avail­able for hire
  • Online doc­u­men­ta­tion
Different

And they are dif­ferent in these ways:

  • Extras in the devel­oper license – Genesis gives you all their themes, those they have now and any that are devel­oped; Headway pro­vides spe­cial devel­oper tuto­rial videos
  • Updates – Genesis pro­vides updates free for life, Headway requires a yearly subscription
  • Design approach – Genesis is text based, Headway is visu­ally based
Text vs. Visual

It is the last of the dif­fer­ences that is by far the greatest dif­fer­en­tiator between these two pow­erful theme frame­works. Developing in Genesis is like pro­gram­ming – you grab your favorite text editor (mine is Coda) and make the mod­i­fi­ca­tions and adjust­ments you want. Headway shares a lot in common with the web plat­form Squarespace, but is based on WordPress. While you always have the option to break out the text editor and dive head first into the HTML, PHP and CSS code, the pri­mary inten­tion is that the bulk of your devel­op­ment efforts will be spent in the Visual Editor.

The Headway Visual Editor allows a designer to start from scratch and design a site using drag and drop tech­niques to place the building blocks of the site (the header, con­tent, widget area, footer and such) and then simply click on the options to set the style of the ele­ments used (fonts, colors, align­ment, head­ings, link hovers, bor­ders and so on). Or you can start with a child theme and modify that with the same approach.

The Visual Editor allows a lot of con­trol, but not all of the con­trol. Each block or ele­ment can only be mod­i­fied in the Visual Editor using the tools Headway has cre­ated in that envi­ron­ment. If you want a header title to have a graphic back­ground, for example, you can do that in the Visual Editor.

Headway Version 3.0

For the com­par­ison in this article, I have dis­cussed the just released ver­sion 3 of the Headway frame­work. The basic con­cept of Headway has not changed – it wants to be a visual design envi­ron­ment. Version 3 has just picked up where ver­sion 2 left off and pro­vided more power in the Visual Editor. But ver­sion 3 is still a work in progress and does not yet include all the fea­tures of ver­sion 2. They are coming.

Notably, ver­sion 3 has no upgrade path for web sites from ver­sion 2. That, too is coming.

New with ver­sion 3 is the licensing and pricing model. Gone is the life­time sup­port; now its a yearly renewal. Lucky for me I got a developer’s license before the release of ver­sion 3 so I am grand­fa­thered in for sup­port for life.

Drag-and-Drop vs. Code

I’m not a big fan of the way Headway ver­sion 3 stores CSS in the WordPress data­base instead of in text files that can be easily edited in Coda. And I’ve been a some­what vocal critic of the orga­ni­za­tion and user inter­face of the Visual Editor. The good news, at least for me, is that you can do all your layout work (which can be very tedious in pure text) in the Visual Editor and then do your design work (CSS) in a text editor – a tip I got from Headway Expert.

There’s more for me to learn since I’ve been using Genesis, and liking it, for a while now. But I started work on a new web site for my pho­tog­raphy work and decided to use Headway together with Gallery+ and ProofBuddy. So far so good and it has let me really get down into the HTML and CSS behind the scenes. I’m doing most of the work using Espresso ver­sion 2 as a change of pace from Coda and a way to com­pare those two strong devel­op­ment tools.

So I may have a more in-depth blog post about Headway and Espresso when that project is complete.

The Focus Pyramid

22 Dec Leave a Comment Filed Under: Opinion, Photography

Today most of our upper end cam­eras have the ability to adjust focus on a lens-by-lens basis. Using that fea­ture can elim­i­nate the front focus and back focus prob­lems that some report with their lens/camera com­bi­na­tion. That’s the good news, the bad news is that you have to find a way to deter­mine what focus adjust­ment to store in the camera for each lens.

One of those ways is to use the LensAlign system from Michael Tapes Design. I have that system and I guess I should just say that I don’t use it. For me, it’s just too big a hassle get­ting it all set up and aligned to the camera. Not that it doesn’t work or it’s not accu­rate, because I believe that it is.

So my lenses have ended up unad­justed in the set­tings of my camera. And the LensAlign sits in its box on the shelf.

On Twitter I started seeing tweets about some­thing called the Focus Pyramid from Allure Multimedia. The Focus Pyramid is much sim­pler in both design and use com­pared to the LensAlign. For one thing, the Focus Pyramid is made out of card­board that you fold up into a pyramid yourself!

To use it, you just put it on a flat sur­face, aim your camera at it, and shoot some frames to iden­tify where the focus point of your com­bi­na­tion is. Give that lens a little + or a little — in the focus adjust­ment menus of your camera, and take another shot to con­firm focus at the center of the target. They have a video to show you how it works.

The wildest thing? It cost just $9.99 as its intro­duc­tory price. I couldn’t pass it up, at that price, and ordered one.

It works as adver­tised and takes just a few min­utes to get a lens set up for your camera. All my lenses have been checked and adjusted (it just so hap­pens that they all needed some about of + cor­rec­tion). I need to take more pic­tures to prove this all out, but the one’s I’ve shot so far have been focused right on the first shot at the widest lens apertures.

Now you surely know that a $9.99 system can’t be “just the same as” a $79.95 system. I sus­pect that the Focus Pyramid is less accu­rate because it is made of flex­ible card­board and doesn’t have any system to be sure that it is, in fact, level and square to your camera’s focal plane. But it worked fine for my lenses. I don’t have any lenses with max­imum aper­tures greater than f/2.8, so there could be trouble with f/1.4 or f/1.2 lenses, I suppose.

Anyway, for $9.99, you can’t lose much by trying one.