* I'm sorry, but I am incredibly, terribly confused.
Everybody starts somewhere; but if your confused; don't press on trying to change the world, until you understand the dirt you happen to be standing on.
* There are several things I would like to do to customise the galleries attached to my site (PhotoParadis.net) but I have no idea where to begin.
Then your not ready to press forward. Get your gallery working and content in place first. Once you have that under your belt, then pick ONE thing to learn about and change, not all three at the same time.
* I know the FAQ would be a good place to startThings I would like to do
Actually.... I'd start with the documentation, then the
tutorial ( with moving pictures no less ), then install the latest Coppermine gallery without any assistance from a third party application according to the Coppermine documentation.
Create some categories, create an album or so, upload some pictures, play with the config.
Then and ONLY then would you actually pick up the FAQ to begin learning about Coppermine's advanced features. You simply have the cart in front of the horse. Give yourself time to experiment, fail, learn and eventually succeed.
You can't expect to buy Autocad, and be able to design a new bridge. Nobody is prepared to learn how to operate Autocad, become a draftsman, learn to be an architect, and be a civil engineer ALL at the same time and expect that their first creation isn't a turd.
Coppermine is just a tool, to be able to trick it out is going to require knowledge of Coppermine's inner workings; if you are not prepared to install Coppermine on your own you are certainly not ready to be taught the intricacies of xhtml;css;php; and sql. To do so would be to meet with utter and total confusion and failure.
* I'm using a Plesk 8.0.0 but don't know much about it, as it's only just been installed.
The only thing you need from Plesk in regards to Coppermine is to create the MySQL database and MySQL user and grant the user the proper rights to the database; a topic that is covered in the Coppermine documentation (not specifically using plesk)
Many beginners have successfully installed Coppermine on their own. How are you different?
* Only for lack of clear assistance really.
There's plenty of clear assistance even for the newbie; But to be very clear, just because you happen to be able to execute Coppermine on your hosted account installed by the graces of a third party installer; doesn't entitle you to support. This is an open source project. The developers donate time to code the solution; supporters donate their time to answer questions; Users must donate time too. Your part of being a responsible open source user is to READ the documentation, USE the resources that have already been created for you, search the forum, and to ask intelligent INFORMED questions. If you can't keep your end of the bargain up; you will find help being in short supply.
We know you haven't read the documentation because if you had; you'd know two out of three things you've asked about are in Coppermines configuration page as selectable options. The third is a question that I know has been answered multiple times in the forums because I've answered it already at least once.