Third Party Photo Blog Plug-in

November 7th, 2011
Will Hughes Photography photo blog

Zenfolio is always open to improvements, which is why we make our interface easily accessible for third party development. Recently, a Zenfolio user went about making a Photo blog plug-in for their own use. Today, this Zenfolian is sharing with everyone how he created it and how you can use it too!

Note that Zenfolio is working towards a full-scale blogging solution and that this blog plug-in is a third party development and not our answer to incorporating a blog into your site.

Photoblog Plugin – by Will Hughes

I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades: photographer, writer and developer.  I began using Zenfolio to host proofs for clients.  I quickly realized how much easier the entire process became of finding clients, communicating with them and then selling to them using Zenfolio.

But I knew to increase my reach, I needed to socialize my site and immediately began looking into whether there was an integrated solution for photo blogging.  Zenfolio said that while it was in the works, they don’t have one at the time. I then learned about the Zenfolio API, a programming service they provide for interfacing with Zenfolio. And thought, well, maybe I could write a photo blog.

I’ll say from a developer standpoint, the Zenfolio API is excellent. In no time I had the basics of the photo blog working.  And then Zenfolio *really* stepped up.  They worked with me time and time again, giving me feedback, offering suggestions and even brainstorming ideas on how I could leverage Zenfolio to market and even sell my new plug-in!

I developed it for myself, but I know many of you would love something like this. So check out the screen shot below of my blog -or you can check out the live photo blog and see if it is something you could benefit from.

It works as follows:

  • Create a gallery to hold the photos
  • Make a new entry in the blog by copying a photo from your site into this gallery
  • Then change the title and caption to be the title and text of the blog entry

Any keywords that the photo has will also be picked up and used in the ‘Label Cloud’ that shows a graphical overview of the frequency of keywords. Users can click on the photo to see it by itself or any one of the keywords in the Label Cloud.  Once there are more than 10 entries, a standard pagination control appears at the bottom.  And the name and caption of the gallery becomes the title and subtitle of the photoblog itself.  It’s really very easy to use and gets me everything I wanted.

To purchase the photo blog, it’s only $10 USD. And currently I’m running a coupon of 50% off to the first five people who purchase it! Just go here https://willhughes.com/photoblogplugin and buy the picture shown.  Then I’ll respond with the instructions of how to install it.  You’ll be off and photo blogging within minutes!

Create your photography website in minutes.