I was talking to a few people on the weekend about this current iteration for my theme, and it seems there’s enough interest that I might eventually set this up as a download, or add it to the WordPress theme repository. But, I’d like a bit more input from some photographers about features I can potentially add.
One thing I was thinking of incorporating was a stand-alone microstock service. For example, beside each photo there would be a “Buy” button that would take you to PayPal. Once you paid your $5 or whatever, you’d get an email with a large version of the photo and a license to use the photo. Still thinking about how that would work, but I think it would be a useful feature, and I’ve always wanted to write a plugin that interfaces with PayPal.
Some other things I’d like to integrate:
- Somehow incorporate Flickr photo comments, which was the original reason I wrote Crossroads years ago
- Have the ability to display Flickr sets in blog posts — basically, after I’m done a photoshoot, I want the Flickr set to tell the story instead of me having to manually write a big blog entry
- Right now the title tags don’t really do anything on the single photo pages — I have to somehow come up with a way to inject information about the current photo into each page, without breaking popular plugins like the All In One SEO pack.
- My main photography page is a bit too static for my liking. I’d like a section at the top that shows my recent photo activity, or something that changes fairly often to encourage people to browse through it
Anything else that would be awesome from a photographer’s point of view?
I like the microstock idea…would this be a solely self run/hosted thing or is it incorporating some pre-existing service for fulfillment?
Totally custom / self-hosted. Still have to think it through, but as long as you upload the full image size to Flickr instead of resizing, fulfillment could simply be an email with a link to download the large file, and some verbiage around the terms for the license. PayPal will automatically execute a callback when the transaction is complete, so you just have to intercept it and do the right thing. Should be easy actually.
Sign me up as a beta tester…I’ve wanted to switch out my flickr plugin integration on my site anyways and have been thinking about alternatives like this.
The ability to change theme colours without having to dive in the the CSS would always be a plus, but I am not too sure how easy this would be to implement.
I think integrating as much Flickr as possible is great that way the theme would essentially update itself saving much redundant work from needing to take place.
Yah, the work involved in having users pick colours in a semi-intelligent way isn’t worth the effort in my mind — might as well hack the CSS. What I would rather do is have a few variations of one stylesheet, and have the user pick from a drop down list. But good input, thanks.
I would never upload my full sizes to flickr, but can see that a quick service would improve the micro-stock sales.
I would not extra need colourpicking efforts, dark monochrome is the best background for colourfull photos.
Besides flickr I use Picasaweb, where I can make hidden albums and invite for your eyes only. Not found a good plugin yet which can easily get thumbs, cache them locally and link to both Picasaweb and flickr.
Any use these remarks?
Good luck
Lawrence
@Rolograaf – how come you wouldn’t upload the full sizes? I believe there’s an option to disable other people from downloading them, and if you have a pro account, Flickr will archive them for you then. I’m just trying to understand the reasoning behind it.
I’ll look into Picasaweb. I use SmugMug for hidden galleries and what-not, I imagine it’s pretty similar. Crossroads 2.0 already supports the SmugMug API.
Had another idea about the Flickr set stuff… it would be cool, if it’s possible, to create a flickr set that would auto post 1 photo a day/week/whatever from that set as a blog post.
So you drop say 10 photos into a set and you get 10 posts from it on a daily/weekly basis with the image metadata generating the post title, etc.
I’m not very well versed in the Flickr API so I have no idea if you can figure out how many photos are in a set, and sequence them somehow.
Anyways, more ideas on the table.
That’s a good idea. So basically like your blog updates itself automatically. I also want to have the ability for a set to tell a story, like if you were to do a photoshoot. So basically the Flickr set Title/Information would become the main blog post, and the photos would rotate or something along with the verbiage for each photo.
But yah, I like your idea.
I think both options would be cool to have…I’d just like to focus the blog posts on the photos without having to write much, if anything about them. I usually find that my posts about a shoot contain text filler so I try to type less and embed more photos. But I also don’t do a photoshoot everyday so it would be nice to flow regular content through on the days that don’t have a story told via a set.