My situation is that I’ve got a finished website, but it’s at an evolutionary dead end, so I’ve got to re-start from scratch. After much googling and kludging around haven’t got a convincing solution, though I know what I want to have. I thought it’s such a generic situation there must be many pre-packaged solutions, but even after looking through all ‘Portfolio sites for artists’ discussions etc, nothing is convincing.
What I want is:
–minimal lock-in. I can change between CMSes, or different extensions in the same CMS, but each time you basically lose all your work because the formats are so different. I don’t want the manual hassle again; or just once with a ‘never again’ prospect.
–organised by file-structure. What I mean is that you’d have a set of ‘master’ folders (one for each artist in a group, or medium/technique by the same, or theme, or …), inside each of those some ‘series’ folders, and each of those contains the images (or sound-files, or video-clips) of what the portfolio wants to showcase. Crucially, each of those folders contains two or more textfiles: One, the ‘text’ (HTML, markdown; some links to downloads/images; cover image; … ) accompanying its content, the other a set of labels/captions. Then the images get shown in the order they’re listed in the label-file (not listed=not shown).
–multilingual. I want to just add labels-eng.txt to serve general visitors, labels-it.txt to Italian-identified browsers/IPs, … . This ways, the same image-folders can be used for serving different galleries/slideshows, if the order differs in the textfiles.
–a lightweight slideshow/gallery plugin. I don’t want to spend time overriding loads of CSS/javascript, I just want to be able to serve from different (parallel) image-folders, small-medium-large (with SCRSET attribute); fullscreen images that I make either the equivalent of CSS “contain” or “cover” image-sizes, and that’s about it.
–working off my no frills shared hosting. So not requiring installation of various package managers etc. I’m fine doing developmental work at home using the commandline, but I want to be able to update “on the go” by uploading simple folders and labelfiles to my webserver — I don’t want to be forced to have all on a laptop 365 with me.
So updating it all is a matter of FTPing a new ‘archive’ — either different images, or more/less series; that’s WHERE I THOUGHT GRAV WOULD SHINE.
The thing is, I have MOST of what I want already, EXCEPT it’s using an outdated/never-updated (fixed-pixelsize) slideshow. Changing is just a hassle, manually show-by-show (I’m dealing with seven ‘master’ folders each 3 to 20 ‘series’ in them); using SQL to override all goes wrong for various reasons (like landscape vs portrait orientation), not just resolution, but transition effect, fill-mode (cover/contain/…), transition duration, autostart, hide/show controls, … .
So, I have no problem batch-generating parallel small/medium/large sets of images (then later adjusting some manually for art-direction reasons — on small phones focus on a detail, on large screen show overall work), and grep-replacing my existing sets of labels to fit other formatting.
Does this sound like something Grav would do for me?
For example, the basic install instructions (“unzip folder in webroot”) good for my webhost, but updating isn’t (commandline package-manager). That said, it’s a “dumb” foldersystem CMS, so (security) updates will be rare I think. I’ve now started and aborted installing so many ‘solutions’ that it isn’t funny anymore… hence this lazy appeal for your input.