Totally lost and frustrated.

ghealy

I've watched hours of video, read page after page of help files, FAQs, etc. and am now more lost and confused than when I started. :dunno

I've not been able to do anything that comes close to mimicking my old site. Is there a basic template that I can use to simply convert my existing legacy site to something that will work on this so called new and improved SM?

If I didn't have so many images already on Smugmug, I'd just cancel and go elsewhere where things are simpler and much less confusing.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

aschendel

I glanced around your site and while you may have a few hiccups (blog integration, guestbook/comments), I didn't (in my very quick tour) see anything obvious that will cause you trouble. What are you most worried about? Do you have suspicions that something you love right now either won't work the same or, worse, won't be available at all? Once you get going, and once you get past the "everything's different" mental hurdle, what you can get out of the new SM is pretty great!

Have you started the migration process? I heard that they put them on hold for few days, so if you haven't started you may end up needing to wait for them to start back up.

Andy

ghealy

Andy, I migrated before the freeze.

What I want is a homepage with a slide show. A page where I can post recent galleries. A Master Gallery page that contains links to my various galleries. A navbar that links to each of those. For now I could care less about the About Me, Contact me and Blog links. I can add those later. Basically what I have on my legacy site.

I just can't my head around how to achieve that. And I can't find any step-by-step tutorials that show me what I need.

I have to say, I've been checking out people's new SM sites and am very impressed. For whatever reason, I'm just too dense to figure how to to set things up.

divamum

Homepage with a slideshow is one of the default offerings for several templates. If you go to customise site>home page (at the top, where it lets you choose which pages the adjustments will affect) you'll see a sidebar that rolls out.

Select "on homepage" - you can then tweak settings under in "add content block" > "Photo" where "slideshow" is a fully customisable choice that you drag and drop into the space on the homepage (you can then delete the default "block"). Image below (obviously, mine is set to "multiple photos" and a collage, but this shows where the selections are so you can dig down into the further choices)

Hope that helps!

aschendel

What level is your account, by the way? There are some limitations to the lower levels I think.

divamum's tips there should get you going on a homepage slideshow, but post up more questions when you get to them. If you were going to try to end up with a look similar to your old site, I was thinking you might start with the Sierra theme and swap out the background image for a solid color and then go from there.

In this thread (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=238056) I typed up a few "getting started" ideas, and a subsequent post includes a link to webinars (that you may have already seen).

In my opinion, one of the more annoying / challenging things with the new SM is that you can't easily see all of the pages you have / can customize. You've no doubt seen the Entire Site, All Folders, and All Galleries at the top-right of the toolbar, but what isn't completely obvious is that in order to get to things like custom pages, customized galleries or folders, the search page, the /browse page, etc., you actually visit those pages when signed in and then click Customize | Customize Site, and you'll be in a "Just This Page" area that allows you to change what those pages look like.


Thanks,

Andy

ghealy

Thanks DivaMum. That's about the only part I had figured out.

Andy. I'm at Power User level, which is suppose to give me full customization ability.

Think part of my problem is there seems to be a renaming of items. On My legacy site I have a NAV bar that appears one every page. But here,the moment I leave my Homepage, it disppaears. I had links from the Navbar to a gallery 'Recent Photos'. I can link to it in the new SM, but now it shows breeadcrumbs that I had suppressed in the legacy version. I do think I saw someone postteh CSS code to suppress breadcrumbs in an individual gallery. Will double check on that.

Another link was to a Page called 'Galleries' which contained my public Gallery categories. Is this what they call Folders now? And is it possbile to rename them to Gallery Categories? Do I need ti create a new page and populate it with categories/folders?

To me the structure was a parent/child/grandchild with each subordinate inheriting the colour scheme, fonts, etc of its higher level. But in the new SM I seem to have to modify each level?

When I customized my old site, I was able to grab code that more experienced members had posted and inserted it where they said it should be. A minor tweak here or there on colour or font size and all was good.

Really sorry to be asking all this, but I just can't seem to figure this out on my own. Thanks for helping.

divamum

Set the navbar up (you have to manually add the links, iirc) with "entire site" option selected (at the top of the screenshot I posted, above "homepage")- that should make it appear on all pages

ghealy

Again, thanks DivaMum. Got that working.

Now need to figure out how to handle the Gallery categories. Could have sworn I saw somewhere where you can create a page and populate it with galleries/folders and then link to that page from the navbar/menu.

Allen

ghealy wrote: »

Again, thanks DivaMum. Got that working.

Now need to figure out how to handle the Gallery categories. Could have sworn I saw somewhere where you can create a page and populate it with galleries/folders and then link to that page from the navbar/menu.

What happens when you go to this category page on new smug??
http://ghealy.smugmug.com/Photography

What do you see?
If nothing you'll have to drag a folder box onto the page.

Click customize > customize site
In the flyout out drawer on the right click on "all folders" to highlight it.
Then in the "add content" below drag a "folder" over to the page.
This will activate the box on all folder pages.

ghealy

Hi Allen.

What I'm looking for is a higher level, one that includes all my categories http://ghealy.smugmug.com/galleries is how I have it on my legacy site. We had js code that allowed us to replace Home with this page in the breadcrumbs. I suspect that won't happen on the new version.

Allen

ghealy wrote: »

Hi Allen.

What I'm looking for is a higher level, one that includes all my categories http://ghealy.smugmug.com/galleries is how I have it on my legacy site. We had js code that allowed us to replace Home with this page in the breadcrumbs. I suspect that won't happen on the new version.

You can add a "folders" box to your homepage that shows all your folders/categories.

But sounds like you'd like this box on its own page.
Go to "organize" > "organize site".
Highlight your name at the top.
Click +Create button above it.
pick "page"
Add in page name and click create
Open page, might have to scroll organizer to bottom to find it.

On the new page click customize > customize site at the top
In flyout drawer on right
Make sure "Just This Page" is highlighted
In the "ADD CONTENT BLOCKS" click "navigation" to expand it
Find "Folders" and drag it over to the page just below the breadcrumb until it shows a very wide green box and let go of mouse.
Hover it and click wrench in upper left of box
For the "Select From" drop pick "Top Level Folders"

This is the page you'll link to just like the old "/galleries" page.

ghealy

Allen. Thank you ever so much for the above step by step. Finally managed to get it in place. Now to play with some tweaks


Really appreciate all the help everyone has offered. Not feeling so lost and frustrated. Again Thank You, one & all.