Advice choosing the right theme for my noob specific purpose

  • sharp3d

    (@sharp3d)


    10 years, 4 months ago

    Hello everyone,

    I’m new to web development and therefore WordPress, which might explain why my questions to follow are written in such layman’s terms. If you’re kind enough to respond to my inquiry, please consider this when responding and write up your responses for the non-technical noob type such as myself.

    To start, I’m wanting to build a site to serve a very specific purpose. I want to host images of textures that I’ve taken, thousands of them, have them organized categorically and allow users to easily browse these images and download them at various resolutions. I don’t know exactly how I should monetize the site just yet, but there are already a few sites out there that do all this, http://www.cgtextures.com being the most popular and to start I will probably take a cue from them and try out a similar approach. Let unregistered users download a certain amount of data(image files) until hitting a certain download cap, upon which they will either have to wait 24hrs to make any more downloads or register and pay a small yearly membership fee to have unlimited access.

    So my main question is what theme to start with? I’ve purchased my domain and installed WordPress and now I’m just browsing all these themes and it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m mostly looking at photography portfolio themes, but these are mostly heavily designed to showcase the photos as art. The site I want to build is more about letting the user easily browse thousands of thumbnail photos categorically and download when they find what they’re looking for. Again all really similar to http://www.cgtextures.com The only theme I’ve found so far that’s even remotely similar is this one http://portfolium.wpshower.com/ from wpshower, but it doesn’t seem terribly customizable. I imagine each one of these image thumbnails being a category, upon clicking one, you’re taken to another similar page further breaking down that category into sub categories. For example: Cement Textures > Bare Cement, Cracked Cement, Painted Cement etc…

    Also it would be nice if I could upload my image files at full resolution and have the theme or plugin create and organize separate files at different resolutions for me… Full, Medium, Small. I’m also toying around with the idea of letting my registered paid members have access to the camera raw file of each image.

    To recap:

    -Host thousands of texture images categorically
    -Easy to upload, manage, update thousands of photos
    -Upload at maximum resolution and have theme/plugin create smaller versions to give users choice and help manage their download cap
    -Free downloads for unregistered users up to a certain download cap in 24hr period
    -Persistent GUI that shows user how much download quota they have left
    -Registering for the site charges user a one-time yearly fee and grants unlimited downloads and access to camera raw downloads of images

    So that’s basically it. Can anyone recommend any themes/plugins as a good place to start? If any part of this doesn’t make sense please let me know. Thank you in advance!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • krembo99

    (@krembo99)

    10 years, 4 months ago

    I will just write it shot :
    I know cgtextures very well, and I know it´s purpose .
    IMHO, No theme will do exactly what you need . a site like that needs a lot more functionality than you would initially think, and you will need to use a lot of custom code ( or plugins ) in order to achieve that .
    Each theme that you will take will have specific issues and problems regarding your requirements .
    Such a specific site requires specific custom coding . and as much as I like and KNOW wordpress, I am not sure it is the right tool for that . ( note : I do not mean it can not be done with wordpress – it most certainly can – What I mean it there might be more specific tools out there ..)

    Thread Starter sharp3d

    (@sharp3d)

    10 years, 4 months ago

    -Krembo99

    Thanks for the advice! I too am a 3D artist. Over the years I started noticing a trend in that I would essentially use the same textures from cgtextures time and time again. Some just worked better than others as a base. I also recognize textures from their site in just about every video game these days. It’s one of the reasons I started getting into photography, to shoot my own textures and feel like I created each project more from my own resources.

    I came into this knowing that there for sure was NOT a theme that would do all these things out of the box, but I was hoping to run into a few themes that looked like they would serve as a good base, so far, not so much.

    I have a few friends that are web devs who initially turned me on to using wordpress after I discussed at length with them what I wanted to do. Hopefully I can cash in a few friend favors if/when I need some custom coding done. For now, I’m still searching for that solid theme foundation to build off of.

    Again any recommendations for where to start, what themes and plug-ins I should checkout would be greatly appreciated!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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