A simplified photoblog.

I finished a prototype of a new photoblog for Jeremey Bot yesterday. It fuses Zenphoto and Wordpress to create a (hopefully) seamless integration of gallery and blog. The way I have it set up, he never has to write an entry. The only entry in the blog uses a tag that imports the most recently added photo from Zenphoto and displays it at 600 pixels wide, and then displays 8 thumbnails of recent images and 8 thumbnails of random images in the footer. The description of the most recent photo becomes the blog entry. All of the thumbnails use lightbox. The contact page and about page are editable through the Wordpress interface. And through some custom hacking that I did for the Circle Six blog, once you’ve logged into the Wordpress admin section, you’re logged into the Zenphoto admin as well. A link between the two allows for editing as if they were integrated. Plus they both have a certain amount of front-end editing ability, so you can log in and then view the site and make changes inline.

There’s always the option to expand it into a more serious blog with more entries and an archive and all of that, but for ease of use it really can’t be beat. I provided him with a drag and drop uploader for adding albums, and with Zenphoto’s AJAX sorting capabilities and mass editing options, it’s really the best way I’ve found to accomplish a gallery/photoblog of this nature.

Just for reference, the following software was used: Wordpress, ZenPhoto, ZenPressed, Lightbox2, FTP-Uploader-Creator, and the K2 Theme with revisions by Low End Theory.