Dynamic Photo Albums
Of common interest on many church sites is the ability to have a photo album. I've been playing around with views arguments, taxonomy and CCK Filefield to try to come up with something nice. I have something worked out.
Basically, I have a view with an exposed filter on the vocabulary (tags) that I figure I'll just have users tag their content to put it into an album. Then the view will pick up new album names/terms in the vocabulary automatically. I'd like to be able to link directly to the album, but I can't seem to get the arguments in views to cooperate to allow me to use a link like http://domain.com/album/tax-term-name.
I'd like to use taxonomy terms to make it super simple for the users. I don't want them to have to create an album somehow before adding pictures, but I don't want all the pictures dumped into the same pot either.
How do you guys handle dynamic photo album needs and the like in your church site?
Similar Way
You can use taxonomy terms the way you describe. http://example.com/photos/tag can be setup in views.
One thing to think through is the use of free tagging or specified tags. With a small or medium size church you might run into issues where free tagging runs rampant. Imagine having an event and 5 people take photos. Each of those 5 people might use a different tag name for the event. This works fine if you are as large as something like flickr. If you are a small or medium church it makes the tag names virtually unusable.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Couldn't an admin come in
Couldn't an admin come in later and make the tags synonyms of a central tag? Or, am I misunderstanding that feature?
Misunderstanding
That's a misunderstanding of the feature. If you want to do that you would need to use something like http://drupal.org/project/synonym_collapsing or do some fancy database changes.
This is, also, more work for an admin. Instead of an admin adding a single term for an event they have to search out the related terms and set them as synonyms of the parent term.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Limiting taxonomy terms
It seems to me that I read or heard somewhere that one should never have more than ten tags on their blog. (I had free-tagging on my own blog and removed it. I had too many one-post tags.)
I think the same logic should hold here (though maybe a little higher limit, say 15 or 20 tags.) If an admin populated the vocabulary with some common things you'd expect to see in pictures (adults, kids, teens, worship, food, fun, fellowship) and allowed multiple select, it should set up some pretty good categories without letting things run amok.
Micah
I'm not using them as tags
I'm not using them as tags though. I'm using them as albums. I expect this would be an event name or something like that. As such, you can't guess what you'd want a few years from now. Harvest Party 08 might become Trunk or Treat 2010.