Trying to include image galleries in listings, looking for suggestions
Howdy,
I've been working for about a week trying to get a small video game related page converted over to Drupal. I like Drupal because it allows me to make fields for all the data in my game listings and use taxonomy terms to help sort and find these listings. I have a content type created for my game listings using CCK fields, and faceted search which works really well for finding/sorting the listings. Example: http://psxanimelist.mattsmessyroom.com/drupal-5.7/
What I'm stuck on is trying to get images in the listings the way I'd like. What I'm looking for is ideally to keep the listings looking something like they do now. Example: http://www.mattsmessyroom.com/ps1anime/3X3_Eyes_Lord_of_Souls/3X3_Eyes_L.... However, I'd like to make the screenshot gallery have more than just a few images, I'd like to be able to add as many as I'd like with a "preview" on the listing page of a handful of screenshots that will link to the "gallery" that ideally breaks the thumbnails up into pages if there is more than a certain amount. I'd actually love to give registered users the ability to upload screenshots to these galleries pending administrator approval.
I've messed around with so many modules. :( I've tried imagefields and attaching images, etc. but I haven't come up with a good solution. I currently have the images module installed. I've uploaded 4 screenshots and made a gallery out of them. I have no idea how to get this gallery to show up inline in the listing or in a block that shows up along with the listing for the hundreds of listings I will have on the site. I'm starting to get discouraged so I thought I'd ask for some suggestions. FYI: I'm a web designer and coder, but I don't know any PHP.
solution found
I didn't see an "edit" option so I'm double posting here. I found a solution. I got some help from this article: http://drupal.kimsawchuk.com/?q=node/5 It wasn't exactly what I was trying to do but it gave me the fundamental tools around which to structure my thinking about the problem.
I ended up creating two custom content types "screenshot" and "boxart". I then created two views, one for screenshots, and one for boxart. Each view is a block and a page. I also made image cache actions for "thumbnail" and "fullview". The views are set to show only screenshot nodes labeled with the "game name" taxonomy vocabulary, or boxart nodes labled with the "game name" vocabulary respectively. The block is a list of field "Image: screenshot (field_screenshot)" using the imagecache action "thumbnails" and the option "as link to node". The page is basically the same only using a grid view from the views bonus.
I have to make two new views for each game listing I create, but for now I feel like that's a small price to pay for getting it working. I'll see if I can figure out any way to make it less labor intensive, but I think this is a workable solution for now.
Here are the results for one listing: http://psxanimelist.mattsmessyroom.com/drupal-5.7/node/6
BTW: Don't take this too personally but thanks for nothing. I was hoping that I'd find more support on this forum than I have so far.
I'm just going to keep multi-posting here...
My previous solution was a partial fix, but I realized that it would be impractical to have to make even one view for each of possibly hundreds of listings that I will be entering into this site. I finally (just now) found a module to solve the problem, Views_Multiblock (http://drupal.org/project/views_multiblock) along with Views Argument API, seems to be designed to accomplish exactly what I wanted. It took a little configuring and some trial and error but I have successfully created two views that dynamically change content depending on the node they are being viewed alongside. I hope that if anyone else is having the same problem, perhaps this post will help you find this module more quickly than I did.