Backlight / Wordpress ... best practices?

SunFoxNC · 2018-01-21 07:40:17

I've been debating the best way to rebuild my personal/family site (www.sunfox.com) for the past couple of months. The primary purpose of the site was as a photo blog/history to share with family and friends (particularly those who are out of state).

Previously, it was split into several sections (one for each kid, one for family with more than one kid involved, and a special section for the 35mm slides of my grandparents and my father's slides from Vietnam) and this arrangement was generally pretty painless using the CSS grid styling available in Backlight+Pages and the Publisher plug-in to manage the albums in Lightroom.

However, the site has grown much too large and I'm hitting the upper limit of inodes which is forcing me to re-tool the site as a current events site where I'm pruning older content rather than the huge photo dumping ground from the beginning of time (well...2003!) it has been.

The redesigned site would have a full-page Vegas slideshow as the landing page and then provide a link to WordPress for the photo blogging. These are pretty trivial to accomplish with Backlight+Pages and the Theatre add-in I've already purchased.

It's how to best integrate the photo galleries into WordPress that has me stumped! So with that in mind, I've got a few questions here that I'm hoping will illuminate the best practices for integrating WordPress:

1. Does the WordPress add-in support inline galleries/albums in the theme that is exported from Backlight into Wordpress?

2. Can Publisher create and manage WordPress posts with text / images (in an inline gallery) / tags?

3. If #1 and/or #2 are not possible, would you recommend using Publisher to export galleries to the Backlight+Pages site (perhaps hiding the galleries and the link to them) and providing a link to the published gallery in a post created in WordPress?

4. What would be the best way to handle inline images in WordPress posts (not necessarily a gallery)? Upload them outside of Backlight and use the URL straightaway or manage them through Publisher?

I'd appreciate any ideas on the best way to accomplish this rather than reinvent the wheel...badly! Thanks!

rod barbee · 2018-01-21 09:57:12

1. Does the WordPress add-in support inline galleries/albums in the theme that is exported from Backlight into Wordpress?

If you mean your Lightroom published albums, then no. Galleries in posts are supported but you'll need to get the images to the post using the normal WordPress uploading procedure.

2. Can Publisher create and manage WordPress posts with text / images (in an inline gallery) / tags?

no, Publisher is strictly for publishing albums (and album sets) to top level gallery folders.

3. If #1 and/or #2 are not possible, would you recommend using Publisher to export galleries to the Backlight+Pages site (perhaps hiding the galleries and the link to them) and providing a link to the published gallery in a post created in WordPress?

That's what I would do.

4. What would be the best way to handle inline images in WordPress posts (not necessarily a gallery)? Upload them outside of Backlight and use the URL straightaway or manage them through Publisher?

I simply export them from Lightroom at a decent size for WordPress posts (I've created an Export preset for this). The exported images are sent to a folder in My Documents for my blog. In the Export preset I've got it set to export the image to a sub-folder of the blog/ folder. I just use the name of the particular post as the folder name.
After images are exported, I just upload them to the post in the usual WordPress way.

SunFoxNC · 2018-01-23 04:25:35

Thanks for the tips...I really do appreciate them and the insights I've gotten whilst lurking about here! That's one thing I've loved since investing in the TTG software at CE4...the support and the user community truly rocks!

I've got a few other things to sort out before I can start re-tooling the site...one other idea I was playing with was letting WordPress rule the roost and just publish galleries to be used by the WordPress posts. IIRC, if I were to go that route...WordPress would be installed in the document root and I'd just point Publisher at the gallery/galleries I'd be managing there. The more I've thought of it, the more that'd be like the site originally worked which was good enough for the family to see the pictures which is what they were really interested in anyway!

One other thought I've had is to build the site locally using WAMP and then every now and then sync Backlight and WordPress plus their databases and galleries it to the web hosting provider. Whilst that would make it easier for me to stage the content...the big concern I'd have is the difference between the local Backlight/Wordpress configs and the remote one. For WordPress, I can exclude wp-config.php from the sync to get round that...is there a similar critical file for Backlight that would save me from having to fool with the base URLs every time I sync or are the configs in the Backlight database?

And perhaps the more important question...am I a fool for even thinking of doing this local->remote sync or should I just develop/publish live and save myself a ton of aggravation?

I will be building a local installation on WAMP to serve as the authoritative archive (which is where the current site is going to move before the redesign)...that way I can keep the remote hosted site relatively small (compared to the 50GB 178K file monster it was 16 months ago after the last major pruning...and is surely much larger now which the current comparison I'm running will prove if I'm even able to back it up locally!).

Eventually it might be nice to be able to "move" albums and album sets between Publisher instances to easily support an archiving workflow but I don't think Lightroom will permit that. Push comes to shove, I can recreate the albums/sets on the target Publisher and republish (which on a local server should be relatively quick) and then bin the albums/sets on the remote server once done.

rod barbee · 2018-01-23 06:44:31

IIRC, if I were to go that route...WordPress would be installed in the document root and I'd just point Publisher at the gallery/galleries I'd be managing there.

The galleries/ folder should be on the same server level as the backlight/ folder. So just put both in the root of the site along with the WordPress installation.

And perhaps the more important question...am I a fool for even thinking of doing this local->remote sync or should I just develop/publish live and save myself a ton of aggravation?

Yes?

It all sounds pretty ambitious though!

SunFoxNC · 2018-01-23 08:33:48

rod barbee wrote:

IIRC, if I were to go that route...WordPress would be installed in the document root and I'd just point Publisher at the gallery/galleries I'd be managing there.
The galleries/ folder should be on the same server level as the backlight/ folder. So just put both in the root of the site along with the WordPress installation.
And perhaps the more important question...am I a fool for even thinking of doing this local->remote sync or should I just develop/publish live and save myself a ton of aggravation?
Yes?
It all sounds pretty ambitious though!

That's a fair cop...I was already coming to that conclusion but hearing it from someone who knows Backlight and Wordpress way better than I do makes it easier to take!

I'm just hoping that by asking questions now rather than blithely proceeding that I won't end up like the previous set of Top Gear presenters (Mssrs Clarkson, May, and Hammond) where most of their projects ended up being "ambitious but rubbish" (but bloody delightful watching them on the telly!).

Unfortunately, this particular site was always going to be a horrendous pain no matter what I did...it's sort of a huge Frankenstein monster (weighing in at 70GB now with nearly 300K files in play!) where Backlight is the fifth different framework used for it's pages and galleries since 2003.

I'd have binned it long ago except that it was a labour of love for family and after fifteen years may as well be considered a member of the family! But sadly without unlimited inodes and a fibre connection...maintaining that fifteen years of history just isn't realistic anymore so I've got to evolve and be more intelligent with the server resources I have available.

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2018-01-21 07:40:17

Backlight / Wordpress ... best practices?

#2 2018-01-21 09:57:12

Re: Backlight / Wordpress ... best practices?

#3 2018-01-23 04:25:35

Re: Backlight / Wordpress ... best practices?

#4 2018-01-23 06:44:31

Re: Backlight / Wordpress ... best practices?

#5 2018-01-23 08:33:48

Re: Backlight / Wordpress ... best practices?

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