How do I make a photo gallery as my website homepage?

danmanchester

As the thread title asks really, how do I make a flash photo gallery that I've made using Picasa and one of these flash templates appear as my website homepage?

I have my own domain and webspace and have tinkered around with Joomla as my cms and got a basic design looking quite nice, but I can't figure out how to just make the gallery appear as my homepage instead of mydomain.co.uk/link=gallery.

I don't want any content/links/pages as such....just the gallery, that's all, can I do it with Joomla...do I even need Joomla? or any other cms for that matter? I'm very new to managing website stuff and I bet I've just missed something very basic and simple but would appreciate any suggestions, thanks in advance.

Dan.

somebody10

What is the URL for your Joomla website?

bingo_bango

If you have installed Joomla, have you done so through cPanel?

Most cPanels will have a photo gallery option to install as well. I have Coppermine and a few others available as an option for mine.

Lil306

danmanchester wrote: »

...
Dan.

Apologies if this is confusing, but I'll try and explain as best as I can.... I'll post some contents of a httpd.conf to give you an example...

What level of access do you have to your webserver ?

I don't know how Joomla has photo galleries. I use coppermine myself and it stores photos in PHP files. The principles should be the same (in theory)

If you have an apache based webserver, it's configuration settings are stored inside a file called httpd.conf. Depending on the settings in the "conf" file, determines which types of files are "served" first when someone browses to your directories

For example, if your apache is setup as .html .php .php5

It means if someone goes to a certain directory on your website, the webserver program will automatically look for a file extension of index.html, then index.php (v4) then index.php(v5) as soon as it finds the first Index extension it will serve that file depending on the config of the webserver

Additionally, if your photogallery home page isn't a normal filename, you can modify your httpd.conf so it looks for "shock" first, then "index" as the filename. Then .swf, .html. php as the file types to load, etc

Personally I wouldn't have a photogallery as a home page mainly because anyone with limited bandwidth will be hammered....


EDIT - Here's part of my apache httpd file. Below you can see it is setup so that it searches for specific filenames to load the "home page", if none are these are present you would see the contents of the folder itself....

Your apache httpd may look something like the following if it uses a photogallery for it's homepage.... (the text in dark blue)

# DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
DirectoryIndex shock.swf index.html index.html.var index.php
</IfModule>

somebody10

If it hosted on a webserver with FTP access I'm not sure he can do the above though? if you have SSH access you may be able to use putty to gain access to it depending on how the server has been setup.

I might be wrong in thinking you can only usually access the httpd.conf etc if you have root access or access directly to the server such as a home server.

Lil306

somebody10 wrote: »

If it hosted on a webserver with FTP access I'm not sure he can do the above though?

I might be wrong in thinking you can only usually access the httpd.conf etc if you have root access or access directly to the server such as a home server.

I'm still learning Apache myself, but the way it works...I think..

The main Apache configration file has a "Virtual Hosts" section, what you do here is enter the path to the customers website (e.g /Drive/CustomerXYZ)

What this would do, would be when someone types in the customers website address, they're browser looks at the httpd.conf on the webhosts server, it finds that specific site in the Virtual Host section. This then loads that directory, and if there is a httpd.conf in that folder I believe it then loads settings relevant to that site

Lil306

Further to my above reply, here's a section of info found on another site to describe it better... found at http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Linux/Q_23510466.html

All of your global settings (everything that affects all of you webs) should be in the conf/httpd.conf file.
You should then define your webs in the conf.d/ directory.

You can define them in the same or seperate files.
Either way the critical info you need is.

<VirtualHost 130.246.19.36:80>
ServerAdmin [EMAIL="webmaster&#64;mail.smallco.com"]webmaster@mail.smallco.com[/EMAIL]
DocumentRoot /groups/smallco/www
ServerName www.smallco.com
ErrorLog /groups/smallco/logs/error_log
TransferLog /groups/smallco/logs/access_log
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 130.246.19.37:80>
ServerAdmin [EMAIL="webmaster&#64;mail.baygroup.or"]webmaster@mail.baygroup.or[/EMAIL]g
DocumentRoot /groups/baygroup/www
ServerName www.baygroup.org
ErrorLog /groups/baygroup/logs/error_log
TransferLog /groups/baygroup/logs/access_log
</VirtualHost>

somebody10

Yeah for a Windows Server it would be that although the http.conf isn't stored in a directory accessible from outside using FTP at least AFAIK but it can be accessed on Linux servers at least using Putty and SSH but whether it will allow access depends on the server's priviliges that are set by whoever set up the webserver.

I have a W2003 server here and use Virtual hosts in the same way - I store the sites using the Virtual Hosts in the Root Dir. of the C: and have my main site in the WWW folder within Apache...well I use EasyPHP.

The conf file is in a directory of the same name on Linux boxes and not accessible from a web browser.

Lil306

somebody10 wrote: »

I have a W2003 server here and use Virtual hosts in the same way - I store the sites using the Virtual Hosts in the Root Dir. of the C: and have my main site in the WWW folder within Apache...well I use EasyPHP.

As mentioned, I'm relatively new myself.

I think if you go with resellers you get these options, I know I was on a linux host and when using the file manager through cPanel I had direct access to the httpd.conf, so I believe it varies too

I'll look up that EasyPHP. My webserver it setup so that Apache serves a different root directory on another drive. I don't like the idea of my website files being served from the Windows Root

It's all about learning, the apache website has more info but it's a learning process. Someone will have it right

Lil306

Here's a different link....http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/412

The user may need to contact their webhost and have the additional file types loaded into the Virtual hosts section.

I'll have to install a linux webserver on my VMWare just to test this out now

somebody10

Lil306 wrote: »

As mentioned, I'm relatively new myself.

I think if you go with resellers you get these options, I know I was on a linux host and when using the file manager through cPanel I had direct access to the httpd.conf, so I believe it varies too

I'll look up that EasyPHP. My webserver it setup so that Apache serves a different root directory on another drive. I don't like the idea of my website files being served from the Windows Root

It's all about learning, the apache website has more info but it's a learning process. Someone will have it right

EasyPHP is basically just Apache, SQL and PHP built into one install and is so easy to use and setup.

The sites I run from root are not important anyway. For a proper website I use hosting that is free but is located in the USA.

I have used Virtual PC in XP with Ubuntu Linux installed onto it trying to host a website but I didn't suceed - the problem was to do with IP address mapping IIRC.