Media galleries

From Version 4.1, FirstSpirit provides an option for outputting pictures from the Media Store in a gallery view. Two forms of display are possible:

Individual galleries:
As a default, a gallery consists of

• a homepage: This shows general information on the gallery such as its name and a description and one or several teaser images, which are usually pictures from the gallery in reduced size. The gallery can be used in the middle of the main area of the page or, for example, in teaser columns, in addition to other information on the page. Name, description and teaser images of the gallery are linked and lead to
• a gallery page: This is the page with the specific gallery. On this page, the gallery pictures can be paged through, mostly with a larger resolution.

Gallery overviews:
If there are several galleries in a project, these can be output filtered by categories (e.g. sport, politics, science) by defining queries.

Technical architecture

The pictures to be used in the galleries must first (like all other media too) exist in the Media Store. All other data such as descriptive texts of the individual media and names, descriptive texts, etc. of the galleries, on the other hand, are saved and managed in data sources. To this end, two tables must be created, which the editor can subsequently maintain in the Content Store:

• Gallery table: In this table, the media of the individual galleries are assigned and general information on the galleries is managed .
• Media table: Information on the media which is to be displayed in the gallery is managed in this table.

A categories table can be optionally created. It can be used for subsequent categorisation of the galleries.

Because general data on the galleries and the media of the galleries is maintained in separate tables, media can be used more than once (in several galleries), each with different descriptive texts. At the same time, a medium in the media table is always only a reference to the respective object in the Media Store. Deleting a medium from the gallery table does not delete the medium concerned from the Media Store.

The creation of media galleries from the point of view of the template developer is explained in the following.