My brother, an ambitious hobby photographer, asked me to set up a website for him showcasing his photography. He had already bought XML Photography Template, a Flash app configured through (usually static) XML files. (No, I’m not a friend of Flash-only websites, I hope we can fix this later…)
Photos are best handled by our Digital Asset Management system DC-X – which might be overkill for a few hundred images, but this felt like a great test case. So I uploaded his photos into my DC-X instance and set up a publication for his website, along with three sections: “People” and “No People” (these are the categories you can choose on his website), and “Background Slideshow” for the images that the home page background loops through. Now he just has to add a “Usage” entry for each photo that is to appear on the Flash website. Looks pretty standard:
Now all I had to do was replace the static XML files loaded by that Flash thing with PHP code that dynamically fetches image URLs and metadata from the DC-X database. Thanks to the powerful DC-X PHP API, this was a matter of just a few hours.
And here’s what the final website looks like. If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t have guessed that it’s powered by DC-X 🙂 To see it in action, visit: www.strehle.de/elias
