I've been doing a lot of reading in the documentation and on the forums, and I've answered a lot of my own questions. For instance, I had hoped to find a nested albums option, but I think I'm finally getting the hang of things when it comes to the catagories/subcatagories/albums relationship. There are other things, however, that I haven't been able to figure out or find information on. I'm not looking for full support answers here, but half of the time a simple yes or no is more than half of the solution and a point in the general direction would be amazingly helpful.
Let me explain my project and what I'm hoping to achieve. I'm putting together a gallery for a scrapbooking page kit website. From our main splash page you will be able to access the gallery, shopping (OS Commerce), message board (PHPbb, we will be integrating here), About Us, etc. We offer 10 basic page kit designs, in two sizes, and in multiple colors, with some variations. In all, there are approximately 360 options to choose from right now, and this number will only grow as we add new kits to our collection. Each of these kits will be available for sale in the store with a link from the store to the gallery to show customers how the kits can be used. We will be dividing the gallery into two sub-gallieries: one for the design team without public upload access and one public gallery with upload capability but no individual album access. (I understand how and where to modify access to these galleries.)
I have begun creating a catagory/subcatagory/album structure in our design team gallery that will allow customers to look up completed layouts made from our page kits by individual kit. I anticipate that customers will also want to be able to look up layouts by designer. I supposed that I could create additional subcatagories and albums that would do this for me, but that would mean that I'd be uploading the same image in multiple locations/albums. Is there a less labor/storage space intensive way to cross reference these images?
The public gallery poses a few more complications. In our public gallery, I want customers to be able to upload layouts they have made from our kits. It is my preference that customers layouts/images go into one large album, the most recent upload displayed first. (I understand how to do this.) Is there a way to make this album searchable by user, by kit, by color, by size, etc? I would really love for a user to be able to search for all the images made from a specific kit or in a specific size, etc. that have been added by other users. Again, I can see where I could create multiple albums to accomodate this, but I only want my customers to upload an image once and have it over with. I definately don't want customers to have to search through a hundred different albums to see all the new layouts/images since they visited. Can this be done?
I have some slightly off topic questions too:
--I need to modify my breadcrumbs to add a link back to the website's homepage. Where does file live?
--Does anyone know where we can find a mod that will allow us to create a single login for our Coppermine/PhpBB and OSCommerce accounts? The Coppermine/PhpBB logins are userid based and the OSCommerce login is email based. It would be extremely helpful if we could get a single login for all three at once.
Thanks in advance for your help. I have been very impressed at how helpful these boards are. I hope I haven't posted anything inappropriate here. If I need to separate anything out and move it someplace else, please let me know.