I love Zenphoto and Zenpage. Iys perfect for what I want to do. But Can someone please explain to me how can have eithe a Page or News to be the index/home page with the list of all gallery's/albums on the right side siderbar. No matter how I have tried to do that I can't seem to get it right. To me the whole point of having the Zenpage add-on is to be able to have a page/newes as your home/index page and then allow your guests and registered users to navigate easily through you albums.

One thing I forgot to ask is on the Zenpage tab in the backend/control panel there are 3 items 1, Page 2. Articles 3. Categories. What exactly is the categories for? How can you make use of it? And when writing an article is what is considered as news? Because there is no mention of news anywhere on the Zenpage tab?

To answer the last questions at first: Pages are static pages while articles are indeed the news and the categories are for the articles which is also indicated with the category selection when adding/editing a articles. Also you would have noticed by trying..:-)

To get the list of the albums in the sidebar you need to enable the print_album_menu plugin. You could also turn of the "news on index" option to get the albums as with a normal Zenphoto theme.

Zenpage is a addon to provide CMS like page management functionality that Zenphoto does not have by itself. That said there is no "correct way". You can of course make your own theme. How that is set up is actually just a matter of your skills. You can make your own theme of course. Please visit the user guide section on the Zenpage project site, there is also a theming tutorial.

Of course further questions are welcome.

Thank you acrylian for your answer:
I do understand than Zenpage is an add-on to give Zenphoto some CMS like functionality. I also understand that with the way both programs(scripts) are written in such a way that like you said according to one capabilities you can customize it to do exactly what you want. Unfortunately I at this time do not have the much needed PHP knowledge to do this, so my question was, based on the default installation and the settings that are available, can you set it up so that the home page will open to either news or a page that you create? And if yes, then what would be the correct settings that are available withing the Zenpage and Zenphoto administration options to accomplish this. Or would I have to do some customization to one of the .php files? If so can you possibly give me a short step by step on how to do this? I'm not looking for a tutorial from you on this subject, only to be able to have either a page or news as the home page.

I did however look at some of the tutorials that you mentioned and sadly they are beyond my capabilities right now. However I am taking a crash course in PHP programming shortly so I will be able to do more. But for now I just want to get my sight up and running. I could always customize it as I learn more. But it is important to me to at least for now that I can have the home page setup the way I would like.

I know the tutorials look a little more complicated as they are but most is actually just simple functions with paramenters and standard html.

Ok I try to give a short roundup:

News on the index: That is (only speaking for the zenpage default theme) an options of the plugn options that is called, well, "News on index". This will show the normal news loop like Wordpress does.
If you disable that you will get the top level albums on the index.php page as standard Zenphoto themes have.

Having a specific page as the start page there is this way which is quite new:
There is this way: http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/05/theming-tutorial/#custom-gallery

Also you can throw out the news loop and the images from index.php and call a Zenpage page directly with this:

"False" means that you can call an unpublished page that then does not appear in the page menu to not confuse any visitors (note the logged in admin will see all pages).
http://zenpage-functions.maltem.de/zenpage/_zenpage-template-functions.php.html#functionprintPageContent
Also: http://zenpage.maltem.de/pages/Theming-tutorial#showing-a-page-elsewhere

I hope that will give you some hint how to do it?

Thank you that is very helpful. But I have one more problem that I can't seem to solve. The lightbox function is not working properly. When I vlick on a picture it starts, the background is dimmed and the little bar is working but when the photo is supposed to show it shows the code (just jumbled letters and numbers. I can escape and it goes back to normal page thumb view but that us it.

You need to set the image protection to "unprotected". These lightbox scripts don't work if it is enabled.

Thank you that fixed it