Making the user side different than the admin?

[karlotta]

Hi!

Here's my problem. Coppermine is a beautiful, complete, rich program that has a ton of features... which I don't need for the most part. All I need is a row of thumbnails on a white background, which will open fullsize with the Lightbox JS application. I don't want menus, footers, logos.. etc, since my row of thumbnails is included as a php?include on the main page of my site, and anything else than the thumbnails will just ruin the rest of the design.

Thing is, I'm afraid to modify the templates too much, since it looks like the admin and user sides are using the same templates. So if I go into the code (template.html?) and delete all the tables with the menus, they're going to disappear from my admin side too, right?

Let me know if I'm wrong and can go ahead with my massive deleting, or if I'm right and there's a way to work around this. I've installed and uninstalled 4 other gallery programs in the past few days, because none of them allowed me to do this EXTREMELY SIMPLE thing I'd like to do. I'm used to content management systems where the admin side is completely different, so this is very new to me and I'm completely stuck.

Let me know if you have any suggestions - and if you want to see the design I'm trying to integrate the gallery into, you can go and visit:
http://www.karlotta.com/flowers - you'll see, that row of thumbnails in the middle, that you click, and they show the pictures into lightbox? That's all I need! I'm installing gallery software so I can have an easy-to-use back-end for uploading, thumbnailing, managing, but this is starting to be a much bigger headache than planned!

Thank you for any kind assistance you can give me. Any suggestion would be wildly appreciated!

Cheers!

[Joachim Müller]

If you don't need all of Coppermine's features, that's fine - you can disable them. However, if you only need a straightforward row of thumbnails that link to the full-size pic I really suggest looking for another gallery or even creating an HTML-only gallery mannually.
If you decide to keep coppermine, it's safe to delete most of the placeholders in template.html. Only keep {SUB_MENU}, {SYS_MENU}, {ADMIN_MENU} and {GALLERY}.
Then make the sys-and sub-menu admin-only by editing themes/yourtheme/theme.php and modifying accordingly. Another (even easier) method is using the final extract plugin to make the menu items admin-only.