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Transatlantic cooperation
Hi there,
We just finished this Txp on steroids driven site for a french Gallery located in Paris called Galerie Louis Carré & Cie
This was a real challenge concerning the importance of the project with respect to the importance of the gallery.
In a few words the Gallery was created in 1938 and has nearly shown a century of art, covering the roots of modern art up to contemporary art, currently showing the work of living artists…
I was in contact with the client here in Paris, did the design and the whole project management…
Textpattern was the cms of choice to achieve this but I wanted to focus on the design and did not feel enough confortable with Txp at that time to do what you can see on the site.
So I decided to get in touch with Rob Sable, better known in here as Wilshire|one , the great Textpattern wizard… After many, many and so many mails and some phone calls we finally did it…
I don’t want to talk too much about Txp stuff, custom plugins etc… Since Rob has done mostly all of it…
If he feels like he’ll come here to talk about it…
So… I’m proud of the work we did together, the transatlantic cooperation is working just like a charm…
Guillaume / Hablablow Webdesignofficina
Last edited by hablablow (2006-05-03 14:20:40)
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
Great Job Guys! There sure is a lot to look at there. Everything seems to be functioning nicely. And one of my favorite aspects is the cleanliness.
Jamie
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
That’s a great design. The type, especially, is well-done, and I love the two-column body text on the artists’ pages. I’m sure I’ll find more to rave over as I look at the site more.
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
Thanks guys
@soulship
> Everything seems to be functioning nicely
I hope so, this was a tough to debug / test everything / site…
@Matt
> I love the two-column body text on the artists’ pages
Done using the excellent jcb_columnize ( v0.5 ) plugin by Jim Benton
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#5 2006-05-04 08:14:07
- alexandra
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- From: Cologne, Germany
- Registered: 2004-04-02
- Posts: 1,370
Re: Transatlantic cooperation
@Guillaume, Rob
very nice site as i did already mention. Now i have a question concerning the flash animated pictures: why did you take flash at all?
Is the flash gallery an addon/premade gallery or self coded?
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
Yes, very nice in use of space, typography, generosity, colour & contrast and depth. It’s fun to explore – almost like a small art resource more than a gallery. Quite a few different templates in there, I guess. With that kind of subject matter I bet it was fun to make, too. Kudos.
@alex
The flash gallery looks like Todd Dominey’s Slide Show Pro in a different colour (and looks all the fresher for it).
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
great job.
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
Thanks a lot for this warm welcome, having worked silently with Rob on it, it’s good to have finally some positive feedback else than a happy client and scrolling the site stats.
@Alex: Thank you for the nice review on Txp magazine. Jakob is right we did use Dominey’s SSP… Except that it ships out of the box without any cms support… That’s where Rob adapted it to work inside Txp…
@sthmtc: thank you.
@Jakob: You are right about the use of SSP on the site. I appreciate your overall approach of the site and I think it’s close to the way I’ve initially tryed to build the design, something that should be open and offering different depth to discover for the visitors and enough space for the artist’s works to express… Basically what I think a website for a gallery should be.
> With that kind of subject matter I bet it was fun to make, too
The site was challenging to make, so sometimes it was funny, sometimes not…
It required a lot of preparation. You had to try to think to everything before the site was actually built and perhaps the most important, how it would be managed with Txp, not to end up with a big mess… Not to mention the design issues and how the content would be organized on the site…
It required also a dose of unreasonable behaviour… Taking on one shoulders an engagement with influential people, this gallery especially, promissing to built what I thought should be a good website: clean, usable and search engine optimized… I first thought doing this on my side, even the Txp integration… But I rapidly changed my mind.
That’s when I get in touch with Rob Sable who’s living in the US, working with a 6 hours delay, very far away from where I work and I never spoke to before and might have certainly been surprised reading my first mail… Working this way requires a lot of project management, organization and confidence.
I knew from Rob his engagement in Txp, I discovered he’s a real pro… Working with someone who shares the same goals, speeks the same technical geek langage and just loves his job is always a great experience… Not to mention again he has a great knowledge of Txp.
Finally I didn’t know until now how far and how much Txp was able to support in term of sizes and quantity, especially concerning the image management…
Until now Dean’s wonder is working fine.
Last edited by hablablow (2006-05-04 13:12:48)
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_I plant seeds for future visions. Farmer of your eyes. Subliminal engineer of your minds. eion founder__
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
As Guillaume has said, thanks for the positive feedback. Its good to hear what other people think after working on this between the two of us for so many months. I agree that the design is perfect for this site. The spacing and colors of the clean design do a great job of highlighting the amazing artwork shown at the gallery.
alexandra wrote: Is the flash gallery an addon/premade gallery or self coded?
As jakob said, the gallery uses SlideShowPro . The slide shows are dynamically generated and images are administered through the Textpattern images tab. I modified TXP to allow for images to be tagged with multiple categories. It is to images what rss_unlimited_categories is to articles.
I wrote about some more of the TXP details of our Transatlantic Textpattern project on my site.
guillaume wrote: That’s when I get in touch with Rob Sable who’s living in the US, working with a 6 hours delay, very far away from where I work and I never spoke to before and might have certainly been surprised reading my first mail… Working this way requires a lot of project management, organization and confidence.
The time difference and distance between us made for an interesting work day. As I was going to sleep, Guillaume was waking up. As I was getting to work, Guillaume was getting to sleep. Basecamp was our constant link. We used it to keep track of milestones, keep to do lists and post messages to each other. Without it the work would have been much harder to keep up with. From my perspective, it was also an added challenge to be building a site in a language that is pretty unfamiliar to me. And I mean the French, not the PHP.
guillaume wrote: Finally I didn’t know until now how far and how much Txp was able to support in term of sizes and quantity, especially concerning the image management…
Very true. With some small additions we were able to meet all of Guillaume’s design goals using Textpattern. We were both a bit unsure at the start but things seem to have worked out pretty well.
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
Great work, guys, and a new site for me to read.
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
Great site. I wish I could read french.
Yiannis
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Re: Transatlantic cooperation
A few words about the choices made for this site
Textpattern
Beside the fact that I already knew it several points where essential to meet with the choice of using Txp rather than building another custom cms from the scratch.
Langage and character management
Building a site in french or any other langage different than english required a tool that handles utf-8 and character encoding well, and so does perfectly Textile. utf-8 encoding can be a pain to run properly and you can run rapidly into severe validation and character bugs just because of the use of a “é” character. I also discovered that the guys who translated Txp into french did a terrific work, although it’s actually running on the site in english.
Clean urls
This was another heavy weight argument to have all pages with the url in plain text for obvious seo and usability reasons. Up to the artist’s works image browser that Rob was able turn into clean urls. That’s good food for robots.
Image management
With some customizations done by Rob and the fantastic glx_admin_image maintained by der GrauMeister the client has a complete image management tool for croping, rotating, creating thumbnails, adding captions… The plugin was tricky to handle first but with a little customization it’s perfectly running… I also realized that http doesn’t allow you to play and upload images as you would do with ftp, the max-weight for an image to be uploaded on the site being blocked in our case at 1Mb… But I think this option may vary from a host to another… So uploading images via http has nothing to do with file upload, wich was in our case limited to 8 Mb.
SlideShowPro
It was choosen to add that catchy feeling that is usually producing the use of Flash on clients and visitors.
It’s also around for quite a while now, bug free and very well documented. The downside is the limited interface customization options it allows. Unless you have some Action Script skills, you’ll be limited to change the colors of the interface only. Don’t expect to find much help in the SSP forums either, as it is a commercial product, the community isn’t excatly the same as in here.
The powerfull side of SSP is that it handles each image via xml, allowing to load each image separately that is said no limit to the image quantity.
Basecamp
As Rob said, we couldn’t have worked synchronically and the project would have beeen much more difficult to maintain without it. You just can not keep track of hundreds of short messages like: Rob, hi, can you solve that…. Guillaume, it’s done… Ok Rob, fine, thank you… etc… Each problem would fire at least 10 mails like this.
I would just recommend to use it for every web project, even personal projects. It’s has some very useful features in the free to try version. Believe me: keeping track of to-do in one place, in a opened tab right next to your current project, when you usually have to manage millions of details when you build a website, can save you a lot of room to do something else. It’s also a great collaborative tool for the reasons explained by Rob above.
Et voilà.
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