Dynamic gallery

[Funessen]

Greetings.

 

I'm new here, and quite new to PHP. I've gone through lynda.com's "PhP with MySQL Essential Training", and that's about what i know of PHP. I know HTML as well, and basic CSS.

I want to create an online portfolio for myself, but I need some help on where to start it off, and how. That's where you come in to the picture.

 

Let me explain what I want to create best as I can.

 

I want a single page website, with no subpages (Well, perhaps an "about me" page, but that is easy enough to make).

I would like it to be a dynamic gallery, where i have, let's say 4 columns, each 200 px wide, and that will also be the fixed width of my images. The height of the images however wont be fixed. This way I can simply scale my thumbnails down to fit the width only, so I don't have to crop the thumbnails. This way the website will look more random, because the images will be different sizes.

 

What I would also like, is to make it so that only some of the images load when you enter the site. Whenever you start scrolling down, I want more images to load, so you can keep scrolling, untill there's no more images on the site. And if you're just comming back to check for updates, you dont need to load it all.

 

(Pretty much like pinterest.com works)

 

Then I would like to make a caption pop-up when you hover over the images, alot like http://abduzeedo.com/ has.

 

Last but not least, it owuld like to be able to upload images from the website via some sort of admin login, so I can upload images from any computer, without having to login via an FTP program or the like.

 

I know this probaly isn't easy to make, but I dont mind busting my ass off getting it to work. I just need some help where to start, perhaps which order to get things done, and some good websites where I can learn what I need, without having to be a PHP genius before being able to pull this off.

 

So if you can help me out, I would greatly appriciate it.

 

Thanks in advance

[gizmola]

For administration of assets, I'd suggest you look at one of the popular CMS/Blog packages.  The most popular ones are in no particular order: Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.  Alternatively you could write a basic CMS for your own personal use that would let you handle file uploads to the site.

 

The rest of the UI features you are looking to have can be done with javascript, and a bit of ajax in some cases.  A popular building block for implementing photoboxes and overlays and making ajax calls is jquery.  Jquery is a foundation library that can be supplemented in all sorts of ways using addon libraries and plugins.  This of course is going to mean that you learn the basics of javascript.  Even though jquery is easy to use, you'll have issues if you don't at least understand the basics of the language.

[Funessen]

I've been using Wordpress a bit, but I don't know anything about Joomla and Drupal, other than i've heard the names before ofcourse. Are they a lot different from Wordpress? And which is easiest to edit from a fairly noobish guy like myself?

 

And comparred to PHP, how difficult is JavaScript bsics to learn?

[gizmola]

Javascript is probably harder to learn than PHP, but the 2 languages share a lot of the basics.  The essential thing to understand is that they serve different purposes.  PHP runs on your server, and javascript runs inside the browser.  You really need both to develop the type of site you want to have.

 

You can play with a lot of different cms's at opensourcecms.com, including the 3 I mentioned.

[Funessen]

I found a Wordpress theme I'm gonna try to modify. Thanks