My attempt at SmugMug based blogging ...

pekr · March 31, 2017

From time to time, I feel the need to post just more, than a handful of photos. I have read some past discussions re blogging and more advanced chat features, so I thought I might try how far I can go myself, using just Smugmug (Smug from further on).

Now why just Smug? Well, even if I am more an IT guy than a photographer, the last thing I am looking for is to run separate site for blogging, messing with links, making sites look&feel identical and consistent from the navigational point of view. Other thing is, that I already introduced few other ppl to Smug, who would feel absolutly lost with any suggestion to use sites like blogger.com. And of course - I really like the simplicity of Smug's CMS. The only comparable site builder I saw, is the new O365 Sharepoint (for what I've seen and investigated).

Comments mechanism, is completly a separate story. While I can understand Smug being worried about spam, I think that at least for custom hidden galleries, anonymous comments could be allowed. We use that simple way as a pre-sale activity, clients marking the photos we are supposed to develop further. Well, end of rant, it seems that we can't change Smug's opinion here, but I do understand, why it makes many ppl angry, to the point of leaving the site altogether.

Let's start with my blog attempt. First - a directory structure. I have thought a bit about that, and found out, that I don't need anything fancy. Most sites, apart from word-cloud, provide you with the year/month/date structure. So let's simulate that:

As you can see, I have created a folders for blog/year, and then it is basically a one page per article. The name of the article contains the date of publication as a first element, separated by a pipe char.

As URLs are supposed to be nicely readable (and hopefully good for SEO - not an expert here), it looks like: site-name.com/Blog. The good thing is, that the folder can have its default page, something like hidden index.html, so let's create a global blog look.

What I decided for is - the blog should not stretch, but use 960px as the rest of our site (apart from our studio main page). Then I created two sections, one per year. Year names are html links to subpages, to filter out specific year. The article list is a page content block element, which displays limited number of pages (4) with pagination, collage landscape mode. I could as well let it just list all articles, sorted by the newest page:

Now I have to create two subpages for a respective year. I used the same aproach as above, this time I let all articles for particular year to be displayed:

Then I started to experiment a bit. I thought to myself - what if I would like to have, apart from an article name, a short article description? So I created an alternative design, where I still used a page content block, containing just one article though, and then I created a html section to hold short perex text.

There's just a problem with such aproach. First - I can't properly align images (well, maybe I could, if I would use a grid setting), adding such text is a bit cumbersome and what happens, if I need to add another article? How do I shift recent ones? The thing is, that you add just one article at a time, and you have two columns. Maybe I could use some decoration, but it surely can't be kind of automated.

So if I would be supposed to design the list of articles manually, why not just use the full manual setup? I really like what I can see here, and apart from nice photos, the result is like that because Smug is really keeping an eye on the correct typography principles. Once again - it's CMS is simple, but effective - it is imo great!

Now the bad part - can you see the nice text overlay there? I got it there by shifting the content block margins. But - it is visible only during the preview. Who the heck decided, that by default, texts go under the images? I have seen some tricks for that, but those required inspection of the CSS classes and doing some overrides. Now - this is NOT simple. Please fix that! Provide some z-index argument, whatever, but fix that!

Now finally the last portion - the article itself. As you can see, breadcrumb is there, article, social media and comments:

And now the conclusion - will special blogging platform be better? Sure, that's why it is being called a blogging platform after all. But is Smug good enough, for the occassional blogging for our clients? You bet!

So what I am actually missing, or what could improve the experience?

1) Fix the stupid thing with the text overlay not being able to be placed upon the image. (Sorry if I am just dumb to not being able to make it work easily)
2) I really wish we could have more than one word-cloud. What would be really useful is to have a keywording for pages, because:
3) ... if we would have one, Page content block could use it as a filter. That way, you could filter page listing by topics and voila - you've got an almost complete blogging platform (well, not sure how the cloud would provide the selected word as an arguement to the page content block, but that's for clever heads to sort out)

Well, and in the end - I will keep the stuff simple, so I will use the automated page content block display, good enough to start occassional blogging.

.... and ... sorry for my English ...

Best regards,
Petr | 2zone studio

Dave729 · April 6, 2017

Very interesting, Petr. Like many others, I wish SM had a more straightforward blogging option, but posts like yours help give me ideas for how to workaround the limitations.

David_S85 · April 6, 2017

I like your directory structure approach. Very clean, organized, and just the way blogs are usually set up. Is there a live link to your blog pages? If you posted a link above, I might have missed it. You have obviously thought through this process and acted on it. I, too, hope SM some day provides blogging templates for the users. It seems like a no brainer to grab more Smugmug subscribers if it was ever implemented.

I experimented a couple years back by simulating a blog format with Smugmug pages, with active rollover links in the right column to other blogs. I never really finished the project, but I ended up liking the result. Not as easy as using a dedicated blogging site and their tools.