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This is the first installment in a multi-part tutorial series that will document the use of the wonderful, free, open-source Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG) application for e-commerce, complete with a shopping cart from PayPal.
Background
Your author is a professional photographer and filmmaker. I've always owned the rights to photographs and source film or video from the projects I've produced. Licensing the rights is called stock photography or stock footage sales.
In the early days of computing I had the desire but not the tools to create a database of each video or photograph (we are talking middle 1990s here).
The scale of the issue is immense. I've got tens of thousands of images, not all "heroes," of course, but at the risk of sounding like I've got commitment issues, I did not want to pour the time into building the wrong database offline - and I wanted one that could be ported online.
So the years past and the archive remained organized, um, visually.
Coppermine Photo Gallery
Then I moved web servers and installed, via Fantastico, my first Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG). The purists will tell you not to do it that way and they have many good reasons for their position.
Installations of any application via Fantastico (available with many good cPanel hosting accounts) is really very simple and easy. That's the good news. The trade off for that simplicity is a history of being several versions behind the latest stable and oftentimes secure release of a software application - and that's not good.
Not going through the manual installation also prevents you from developing an understanding of what is going on under the hood. If you want (and who would not want) the website to work properly over time (not crash or be cracked), you'll need to keep it up to date with application patches and updates. Not knowing how it works will make this process much more difficult and problem plagued.
While it has not happened to me (I've not tried it) I've read where updates of CPG via Fantastico results in broken websites and other issues. The official CPG forums frown on anything but a manual installation or update.
The first CPG galleries I installed were intended to allow visitors to magazine style websites on airplanes and dogs to share their pictures, rate others, compete in contests, and showcase beautiful imagery.
That's pretty much the bread and butter of CPG and very little in the way of tweaks or hacks were required. I did need to add some advertising and wanted to improve the search engine optimization or SEO of the galleries, but those steps will be part of another tutorial.
So with nearly of year of plug and play CPG experience under my belt I set out to upgrade my royalty free stock footage gallery to the most recent version, and install a hack or modification to add a built-in shopping cart that worked seamlessly with my PayPal merchant account. It worked. It's alive. But the process was a bit of an adventure with some unexpected challenges and unpleasant surprises along the way. I think the time spent was well worth it and I learned a lot about PHP, MySQL databases, phpMyAdmin and Coppermine.
Stay tuned, in part 2, first steps: Back-up and upgrade. |
