I'm trying to learn the possibilities of ZenPhoto/ZenPage to integrate a photography website that also includes some illustrated stories/pictorials/tutorials and the home page with news or links to articles. Here are the questions:
Many thanks.
No, the efferescene+ theme that is included in the Zenphoto package contains also support. If you want something differently you would need to do it yourself. We/I just don't have the time to build a bunch of themes.
Well, that is made because it makes sense from the usability point of view to be able to access any part of the site from any page you are on. But if you don't like the setup of course you can customize a theme as you wish. Please read
the general Zenphoto themining tutorial on http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/05/theming-tutorial/ and also the additional Zenpage theming tutorial on http://zenpage.maltem.de/pages/Theming-tutorial to learn about it. Of course you will need some decent knowledge on (X)HTML, CSS and PHP to fully customize a theme to your own vision.
A page is just a standalone item and can be also sorted freely and also nested within subpages. Articles are just a news items (Wordpress calls them "posts") that are always sorted by date (logical for news I think) and also can be in categories.
You can of course rename anything that is in the side bar (I assume that you mean that). There are no options for that but you can do that easily in the Zenpage themes sidebar's code.
Many thanks! There is a related question:
What's the easiest way of including a standard menu link bar (say on the top of every page) that would include the main links to pages (e.g. home, contact, gallery etc.). In other words, is it possible/practical to make a sensible/clean website based on ZenPhoto/ZenPage if it is going to only contain images and text? Many thanks.
p.s. a website that I cherish, and understand was done, at least partially with ZenPhoto, is http://www.boutsdeplanete.com/. Are there other technologies used there?
To your first question: Of course, absolutly, that is for what I made the Zenpage plugin. The Zenpage theme just follows a general setup as known from Wordpress and other systems. That said you don't need to follow this exact setup which is just a example how it can be used (the zenpage project site itself does not, too).
If you want to have only the main links like on boutsdeplanete — which is indeed Zenphoto plus I think plain html — you will have to make a hardcoded menu and link directly.
The efferescence theme (sbillard added the Zenpage support and uses it himself: http://www.sbillard.org/) should actually show those. But you probably have to set the custom index page option on the theme options. I am actually not that familiar with this theme I admit.
Many thanks again. This probably should go to a new post, but to end this line of questions:
In ZenPage default theme, the menu bar on the right is enabled for all pages. Now, if I would like to have some gallery pages using the same style breadcrumbs etc., but without ZenPage menu would that require customizing the original theme, and then using two different themes - one for pages with menu, one for pages without it? Many thanks.