I am using dynamic albums to display in my blog page the latest image uploads as an aggregated blog post rather than separate image posts. I am doing this because my photos are organized by topics, not by dates, and when I am uploading new photos I need to notify my blog readers that there are new additions in the gallery with my latest work.
It's kind of a patchy method but it works fine for me and it behaves exactly how I want except a small detail. There is no way in the blogs sidebar menu to select a category that displays only dynamic albums. I mean, I can write a link that links to the album which has all my dynamic albums but that would confuse my readers. One moment they were in the blog and in the other they jump in the gallery without expecting it.
Also I have hidden the master folder for dynamic albums in order to help users make sense of my gallery. To put it simply: I have "highjacked" the virtual albums and I'm using them as blog posts. So they need to behave as blog posts all the way through. I mean if I make a link to the main album for the dynamic albums they will show as albums. But if there's any way of selecting them via url in a blog category they will show as blog posts.
(EDIT) Forgot to mention that all my albums look like blog posts. It's a design decision I made in order to maximaze user traffic
Sorry if I'm a bit confusing in my explanation.
Thank you!
Zenphoto
Comments
Zenphoto has a built in blog with the Zenpage plugin which has the CombiNews mode to list gallery items with the actual news articles as if they were news articles (call them fake articles). There is however no single fake article page as that is the page of the gallery items itself. Therefore you can't display the gallery items within the news section alone.
But this is not what you are using, right?
As far as I understand you have your toplevel album entries desigend to look like blog entries? What is the problem? You can select any album with the album menu plugin. If all album entries are designed to look like blog items you would get what you want.
Otherwise please post a link to the site as it is hard to help without seeing it.
http://aerografie.ro/page/news
There are three types of posts (news) displayed there:
-news article posts (can be categorised)
-new album posts which include new dynamic album posts (can't be categorised)
This is the album which hosts all my dynamic albums:
http://aerografie.ro/noutati-inspiratie/2012
It is hidden from the gallery and it has the sidebar navigation menu disabled from the theme files. I need to make all of these avaible in the Blog sidebar navigation menu as a separate category.
I could make an effort to make it look like it is from the blog just by hacking the template. but that isn't the best way... I thought since the news page can list those new dynamic albums as posts mixed with my news articles maybe there is a way to display only the dynamic albums in a separate category of the news page.
Thank you!
So does that use the standard next_news() loop?
And if so why don't use the standard news.php page??
Anyway, just listing the CombiNews (I assume that you use this setting since you don'T answer) entries is not possible with the Zenpage news loop. Two solution:
a) Built your own loop function. A lot of work since you have to mimic everything that is already there.
b) Add a menu entry that links to the album directly that contains your albums and make that look like the news entries. Use the menu manager to create such an custom menu.
I think I will go with the second option and I will try to fake that album as a category in the blog. I'll use a if condition to detect the album from the url string and I'll do the rest from css.
Sorry for so much confusion with this topic and thank you for your advice!