[TYPO3] Artist galleries

[G. Armour Van Horn]

Greetings:

I've been doing a few sites for artists and am under some pressure to 
step up to the level at which the artist (who is taking the picture and 
writing the copy anyway) can go to the site and add new pieces to their 
galleries. I've been building these sites for years with (please don't 
laugh here!) FoxPro under Windows. I have a table of individual artworks 
with names, filenames of images, pixel dimensions, price, description, 
series, etc., a table with the series numbers and full names, and a 
couple of scripts that write out all the HTML.

A typical gallery page from this process is here:
    http://www.bigskydyes.com/rustdyed.html

Note that there are seven galleries currently, one for each series, and 
that the gallery page lists all the individual work in that series with 
thumbnails. There is an alphabetical index to every work in the artist's 
portfolio on the bottom of the gallery page. Now, if you click on any of 
these, you get to, for example:
    http://www.bigskydyes.com/html/barbedwire.html

Note that we still have access to all the galleries, and we have the 
list of each of the individual works in the series at the left. In this 
case there is a main photo (same image as appeared on the gallery page, 
but larger image size) and one detail shot, some pages have two details.

I think that this level of internal navigation, if not exactly this 
setup, is critical to making a site like this work.

So here's my question: Can sites like this reasonably be setup in Typo3 
without an advanced database administrator to make it work?

My expectation is that it can be done. I'm assuming that the integration 
with ImageMagick will allow the images to be resized to fit the template 
and the pixel sizes relayed to Typo3 to provide the height and width 
values in the img tags. (Currently I size the images in Photoshop and 
manually enter the pixel dimensions in the main table.) And, of course, 
that when the artist uploads a new piece to a specific gallery, that 
piece will appear in all the proper places.

I've struggled a bit with installing Typo3, to the point where I have a 
site with backend users but I haven't figured out how to add any pages. 
I'm sure I could make it work, or rip it out and start over and make 
that work, which amounts to the same thing. But before I do that I would 
like a reality check to make sure I'm on the right track, and that Typo3 
is really the tool I should be using for hosting future sites for other 
artists.

Van

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