25 - Starting the ExpressionEngine Photo Gallery Implementation
With the decision made to move forward with the Photo Gallery module, this chapter covers installation, configuration and getting some content into the Gallery.
24 - Photos in ExpressionEngine: Gallery Module or Weblog?
The church series resumes with work on the Photos section of the sample Church site.
There are essentially two ways to build a gallery with EE - either use the Photo Gallery Module that comes with the Personal and Commercial versions, or roll your own using a weblog and custom field approach. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages and in this post I’ll cover some of those and lay out the direction for the sample church site.
23 - Pulling Events to the Home Page
Continuing with the events theme, this chapter looks at pulling church event information to the site’s home page. While I’m there I’ll also replace the Mission Statement area with the latest posts from the Weblog, as I don’t think mission statements are the best use of home page real estate - ever. New coding approaches covered in this chapter include the use of plugins - which will allow the reuse of content while keeping the site design happy. I’ll also use a new parameter on the weblog entries tag - the start_on parameter.
22 - Displaying Related Events on Ministry Pages
One distinct advantage of using native ExpressionEngine functionality for a church event calendar is that the event information can be pushed and pulled to different parts of the site. In this chapter I’ll show how to display upcoming events on the Ministry detail pages. New EE functionality this chapter covers will be the reverse related entries tag.
21 - Implementing the Event Calendar Details Template
In this chapter I’ll cover the implementation of the Event Details template. This is the template that will load when a site visitor clicks an event title on the default calendar view, and will display the rest of the information about the event. New ExpressionEngine functionality covered in this chapter is the display of related entries. In our case this will mean displaying the name of the ministry group that is sponsoring the event, and linking ministry name to the ministry detail page.
