Joomla for an art gallery

[animalani]

Hi,

I plan to use Joomla as the platform for an art gallery website. Can anyone give me some pointers towards how I should proceed and whether Joomla is the right choice for this kind of a website?

Basic requirements:
1. Separate pages/sections for artists (maybe one page for each artist).
2. A gallery for the art collection. Linkage with the artist would be great.
3. Blogs & Forums for the artist community.
4. Of course the obvious stuff like home page with recent news, updates, etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated so that I can start this project on the right note!

Thanks.
Ani.

[mokelly]

Joomla is an excellent choice. You will need an extension like Simple Image Gallery to display your photos. There are at least a dozen photo gallery extensions. Stick with the most popular extensions as some of the others are difficult to install.

Good Luck!

[animalani]

Hey thanks for the amazingly quick reply!

Would you recommend any particular gallery plugin?

Cheers!
Ani.

[mokelly]

I use Simple Image Gallery

[animalani]

I tried Phoca Image Gallery and it's quite good.

I also want to build a directory of Artists along with their prog\files and images of their creations. Any ideas for that?

Cheers!
Ani.

[mokelly]

Using the Joomla section/category and menu layout you can accomplish quite a bit without an extension and entering content is much easier.

[wernerglinka]

I am getting here a little late. I have been looking for the perfect gallery module and I haven't found it yet. Everything I have seen so far is somewhat limited. I am looking for an extension that allows front-end upload, great flexibility in page layout and a system that allows thumbnail generation and image attributes like title, year, medium, size, all of course "styleable" with css. I just looked at JX Catalog as a way to organize all the art works but the extension is buggy and there is no documentation.

I believe that an artist website should have a distinguished style not like all the other photo album sites with their mostly ugly "overstyled" skins.

I have developed a site for the artist group German American Artist http://www.germanamericanartists.com and here I have used Simple Image Gallery PRO. This plugin is quite good, it needs better styling for the image caption but otherwise it's ok.

I would be interested in what you ended up using.

Werner Glinka

[animalani]

Yes, I did consider using Simple Image Gallery, but have settled for YooGallery for the time being. I am not sure yet if it's the best way to go about it since there's no front end upload for YooGallery, but the site is not yet providing that facility and only the admin can add images using the backend. Still waiting for the perfect solution though... :-(
Ani.