Help Customizing my gallery

[yfrigi]

I need help customizing my gallery.  My original gallery (which I created myself using Dreamweaver) can be found at http://mikolji.com.  Recently I came across Coppermine and installed it (you can see it at http://mikolji.com/galleries).  Now I need some customizations to make it have the look and feel similar to my original site. 

Basically I would like someone to create a theme for me that will be similar to what I have at mikolji.com (similar look and feel but using Coppermine instead of the regular html.

I like the pinmine theme but without the masonry aspect, more of a 'table' look where the boxes are all the same width and length. 

What we need is roughly:
1)   Theme that is similar to 'pinmine' but without the masonry, more of a 'table' look where all the boxes are the same length.
2)   Need two two columns added, one on the left side and one on the right side, to display google adsense.
3)   We also need to change the search to a google adsense search
4)   The footer similar to my existing website (with the social media icons and copyright info)
5)   Add the link to our store
6)   Would like the top menu to be fixed, meaning it always shows as you scroll up/down.

Budget:  $200

[yfrigi]

Budget upped to $650. 

[yfrigi]

Hi Andre, for some reason I'm not allowed to send personal messages so I'll answer your question here.  If you look at my existing website (mikolji.com) and enter in English, you can see at the top right corner my search for my website is powered by google.  It means that I get paid when a person uses that search engine to search my site, instead of the regular search.

I would like to complete the job by end of January if possible.

I have been contacted by other developers suggesting that I change the entire website I currently have to a CMS like Drupal.  Not sure if I should go that route.  Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Regards,
yfrigi

[phill104]

I think what you are looking for should be quite simple and to me $650 is a bit high but that does depend on how much tweaking you need. Having said that if you were going to go down the CMS route it would be about the right price. I currently help out at a Joomla template club and to migrate your site to Joomla would be quite a simple task. However, I do feel what you currently have is quite a simple setup and as such Joomla or any other CMS would be a bit bloated for your needs. That is unless you plan to increase quite a bit what you are currently doing with your site and add a lot more content. Maybe have a think about what you want from your overall site then decided. To migrate to Joomla and integrate your current gallery would take about 4 days work.

I'm currently laid up in bed having injured myself so could not take on the job until I can sit upright again but if you are still struggling to find someone in a week or so drop me a message and I will see if I can help.

[yfrigi]

Thanks Phill.  Good luck with your recovery.  We are not in a terrible hurry for this.  We want to make it right the first time.  I am so glad so many people in these forums are so helpful.  I am so greateful about that.

After talking to some developers and thinking about this some more, I feel our best option might be to combine two of our websites into one.
The original one (mikolji.com) and our website which is kind of an Atlas for aquatic life (aquatic-experts.com).

So the requirements are evolving as we think further down the path of what exactly what is what we want.  I have been working on both of these sites for years without any knowledge of web programming, just using dreamweaver, and I have reached my limit.  I do have bigger plans for the websites, but my ability limits what's possible.  That's why I'm attracted to the idea of moving everything to a CMS and continuing growing from there.

The most interesting part for me would be which CMS would provide me with the best 'taxonomy' for the website.  I don't want to have to upload the same picture or video several times depending on the language or whether it's my personal work or my aquatic organization work.  I'd like to have one database and probably one website and access everything there.  I need to think very carefully of the categories, subcategories, fields, structures, etc so that if we are going to do a remake of the website we can make it right.

I think Coppermine is the best gallery out there by far, and I don't know if it can be incorporated into a CMS like Joomla or Drupal but my end goal is to make it simple for the end user (be it my corporate customer like Nat Geo looking for a video of a rare fish, or a kid in high school looking for info on piranha habitat) to be able to find what they are looking for.  AND for me to be able to get the TONS of pictures/video/data from my hard drives up to the website, because as you know, it does no one any good just sitting in my drive.

Thanks for the feedback.  If you can look at aquatic-experts.com and compare it to mikolji.com and see how I can combine both into one that would be the ultimate! 

[phill104]

Incorporating CPG and Joomla is relatively simple especially as one of the devs has come up with a great CPG-Joomla Tunnel. On the language front there is a great little plugin for Joomla that will translate automatically and while it is based on Google or Bing translation it is not perfect it certainly saves a lot of work. It means you can write the articles once then it will generate them in the other languages of your choice.

Personally I would try and avoid Drupal for your needs. It is a great CMS but really is best for big sites and is not as user friendly as some others such as Joomla or Wordpress.

Combining your two sites would not be a problem at all but you would need to sit down and plan what you want carefully. Work out what features you need, your menu structure and your site map etc. The key to having a good site is in the planning at the start, the look comes further down the list as getting your structure and usability is the hard bit.

Just to get an idea of how you can lay things out in various CMS packages take a look at some of the demos available.

Joomla - http://www.joomlart.com/joomla/templates
Drupal - http://www.themebrain.com/drupal-themes
Wordpress - http://www.designwall.com/wordpress/themes/

[Αndré]

According to Google's cache at least those posts are missing:

If you decide to use Coppermine connected to a CMS I recommend Phill, as he has obviously more knowledge and experience regarding the different CMS solutions than me.

Andre,

Sorry, didn't realise you had already made contact.

As for freelance work it is something I very rarely do and since joining CPG I have probably only taken on 3 jobs, all times because they were either getting some very odd advice or because I felt sorry for them (they had been hacked). It is just not something I am usually interested in preferring to help rather than earn particularly when people want to pay for a version upgrade. I would much rather teach them to do it themselves than take the money and run.

My CMS experience really comes from working with the team at Joomlart and helping on their support forums for the last 5 years. I say helping, it has been financially rewarding. I've learnt a lot about Joomla and Drupal as a result but no so much about Wordpress.

yfrigi,

In this case if you are sticking with a CPG only solution Andre is a true star and knows CPG inside out. If you go down the CMS route I am happy to work with you when I recover though I would probably struggle to change the CPG search to a google adsense search engine, it is not something I have ever looked at.

[yfrigi]

OK we spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted and I am attaching the new specs to this post.  Of course I realize the cost will change.  Please let me know how much and how long something like this would take and any other questions you might have.

[phill104]

What you are looking for there is a complete site build. Much of the functionality would not be something Coppermine would be best suited too. Do you need others to be able to upload images or is it just you and other admins?

[yfrigi]

Yes it surely became a complete site rebuild with Coppermine being a portion of it.  And no, we don't need anyone other than the admins to upload anything.

[phill104]

I have sent you a PM