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Hi,
I'm coming from Highslide CE 3.1.5 / TTG Pages 3.7.3 which no longer work in LR 6 / LR CC. So I jumped to the CE 4 Web Publishing bundle.
I have just read the "Beginner's Guide to CE4 Web Publishing bundle" (http://ce4.theturninggate.net/docs/doku.php?id=ce4_101) and I'm not sure I have understood everything correctly. With the older versions mentioned above, I had no problem using the upload mechanism built-in in LR. Never had any error. Now the Beginner's guide is telling me that I shouldn't use this feature and upload the generated gallery or TTG Pages generated site manually using a FTP client. I have no problem with this but I thought that CE4 Publisher was here to do that. Why should I now use a FTP client while I never had to do that with much older versions?
Moreover, with this old versions, I just had to create a collection for each gallery, switch to the Web module, setup various options and click on upload. Now, things appear to be different (more complicated) with CE4 Publisher which is supposed to make things easier if I understood well. I have to create a gallery template elsewhere, upload it to the the Publisher service, which doesn't actually create any gallery and then I have to add pictures to the album.
I may be dense but this Beginner's Guide is somehow unclear. If I purchased the bundle, it is because I wanted to use the Publisher. So the whole process description shouldn't involve any FTP client.
Also, the video available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rP-fR_ja4o give significantly different instructions than those in the Beginner's Guide. So which one is the right one ?
Patrick
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To make my question more accurate (and shorter :-) ) : I don't clearly see the connection between CE4 Pages / CE4 Gallery and CE4 Publisher. I don't see a clear workflow between these modules, especially with CE4 Publisher which doesn't seem to be "connected" to the two others.
Patrick
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Matt has long advised using FTP over Lightroom's upload feature, even back in the early days of TTG, so nothing new there. If it worked for you before, great, but it is buggy and unreliable.
You need FTP it initially upload assets.
Publisher can create albums and album sets but it needs templates placed online to work with. So you need to export and upload at least one gallery template to create albums. But you only need to export and upload this once. Prior to Publisher you needed to export and upload each and every gallery.
With Publisher you can create as many albums as you wish from a single gallery template. And using Publisher, if you make a design change to the template, that change will instantly be applied to all albums.
Say, for instance, you wanted to change the background color of your navigation. Prior to Publisher, to make that change in all of your existing galleries you would need to re-export and upload each of them. With Publisher you just make the change to the gallery used as the template then re-export and upload that. Now all your albums have the new nav background color.
And since Publisher uses a template, all the album (or album set) page assets are already online. So not only do you not have to export a new gallery, uploading of the album page assets is not required. When publishing an album, only images need processing and uploading. This saves a lot of time.
CE4 Pages creates the site. With the exception of the Home page gallery, Pages cannot be controlled by Publisher, therefore you need to use FTP. Publisher creates albums and album sets, which require templates created by CE4 Gallery and CE4 Autoindex, respectively.
Once you've published albums and album sets, you can move them from within Lightroom's Publish service simply by dragging them to a new location.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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What inconsistencies are you seeing between the tutorial and the video? It would help to clear up any confusion if you could give specific examples.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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Thanks for the details, Rod.
Say, for instance, you wanted to change the background color of your navigation. Prior to Publisher, to make that change in all of your existing galleries you would need to re-export and upload each of them. With Publisher you just make the change to the gallery used as the template then re-export and upload that. Now all your albums have the new nav background color.
I understand. Now, if you have a look at my current site (www.ppphoto.fr), you'll see that each gallery has a different accompanying text. In my current version of TTG, this is specified in the gallery template itself. What if I want a different presentation text for each gallery (album) ? Can I change this for each gallery before publishing and only for this album without affecting the common template?
Patrick
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What inconsistencies are you seeing between the tutorial and the video? It would help to clear up any confusion if you could give specific examples.
Just, the suggested workflow is quite different.
Patrick
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I understand. Now, if you have a look at my current site (www.ppphoto.fr), you'll see that each gallery has a different accompanying text. In my current version of TTG, this is specified in the gallery template itself. What if I want a different presentation text for each gallery (album) ? Can I change this for each gallery before publishing and only for this album without affecting the common template?
In the Publisher Album setup there is a Page Content tab. In that tab you can add any album specific text you like. You can also include any text that you entered in the template you're using.
And you can easily change the text any time you like by editing the album. Change the text, hit the "Edit" button and the text for that album is instantly changed online. This is just one of the great features of Publisher. If you misspell something you not longer have to correct it in Lightroom, export, and upload. Just edit the album, page copy in Publish Services.
The ability to add template text is also a valuable feature. For example, the sidebar in all of my albums has information about image licensing. This text is in the sidebar copy field of the template. So all I have to do is set the Sidebar Copy placement option on the Page Content tab.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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Just, the suggested workflow is quite different.
I'll have to review the video again, but from what I remember it's a good description. There may be differences between the two, but it would only be different ways of doing the same thing.
Either will work, but I can see that it could be confusing to someone new to it. I've been messing with it for so long that it all makes sense to me. But if you find something specific that doesn't make sense, be sure to post a question about it so we can clear it up for you.
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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In the Publisher Album setup there is a Page Content tab. In that tab you can add any album specific text you like. You can also include any text that you entered in the template you're using.
OK. Thanks. It's becoming clearer now.
Patrick
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Just, the suggested workflow is quite different.
Either will work, but I can see that it could be confusing to someone new to it...
Thanks very much. It's true that the old versions of TTG CE was apparently simpler but was also time consuming since each change in a gallery or in TTG Pages implied re-uploading the whole stuff.
Maybe a simple document explaining how each CE4 module is related to the others could help.
Patrick
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this might help: http://ttg-tips-and-tricks.barbeephoto.com/plug-ins/
Rod
Just a user with way too much time on his hands.
www.rodbarbee.com
ttg-tips.com, Backlight 2/3 test site
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