With so many web engines to choose from, getting started with TTG may seem daunting at first. This page attempts to provide orientation material that should help to ease your introduction to TTG offerings.

Let it first be said that TTG engines may be used individually to create standalone image galleries, just as those included with Lightroom. The true power of TTG is unlocked, however, when multiple engines are used in tandem to create a website. You see, TTG is not about the singular web gallery, but about the larger whole, the website and the framework that binds multiple galleries and information pages together as one entity on the web.

The most basic TTG websites incorporate two engines. The first is TTG Pages.

TTG Pages is used to create the pages for your website, including Home and About pages, a Contact page with email contact form, and a dynamic, self-populating Gallery Index. The gallery index utilizes PHP to create a table of contents of for your image galleries; it updates itself automatically whenever you add or remove galleries to/from your site, so that you never need to modify your code to load new work into your online portfolio.

When TTG Pages is exported, the generated pages are created inside a folder at whatever location you specify during the export process. Inside this folder is another folder named “galleries”. I typically refer to this folder in writing as /galleries/. This folder is important, as you will see below.

The second component is an image gallery engine, and you can choose any of those listed in the HTML Galleries menu for this purpose. My highest recommendation, though, is to use TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, as it is the most flexible and feature-rich of the available TTG web photo galleries, and the only TTG engine that presently offers e-commerce capability.

Whatever your choice, you should use the image gallery engine to create as many image galleries as you like. Each will be exported to a folder of its own. These folders should each be placed inside the /galleries/ folder created by TTG Pages. Placing them here ensures that the Gallery Index will see them and therefore include them when the index is generated.

Please note that the Gallery Index, being based on the PHP scripting language, must be run from a PHP-enabled web-server. That means it needs to be online in order to function, and that it will not render your gallery index if run from your local desktop. It is recommended that your web host support PHP version 5 or above, with the Glob() function enabled.

For detailed instructions on using TTG Pages and other TTG web engines, please see the specific pages for each product. Also, see the Essential Reading page, and check for additional tutorials and resources using the Tag Cloud and Categories listing located in the site sidebar.

Extending your website

The information above introduces the two-template concept for website creation. Websites can be further extended, however, by tossing additional engines into the mix. Here are some examples of other TTG engines you might wish to utilize in creating your website.

Flash galleries on your Home and About pages

Using TTG Pages, Home and About pages each contain an image. It is possible to replace this image with a Flash gallery or slideshow, however. This is easy to do. Choose an engine from the Flash Galleries menu here on The Turning Gate, or choose another supported Flash gallery such as Slideshow Pro, Dimin Slideshow or even utilize images from your Flickr account. In the Appearance control pane in TTG Pages, you can setup your Home and About pages such that the image on each page is replaced by an empty stage for a Flash gallery.

Create your Flash gallery using a separate web engine, then combine your exported Flash gallery with your exported TTG Pages files as instructed from within the TTG Pages preview in the Lightroom Web module.

Flash galleries in your Gallery Index

Maybe you would prefer to use a Flash gallery for your image galleries instead of one of the TTG HTML-based galleries. If so, you have two options.

1) Enable Shadowbox features in your Gallery Index. For information on how to do this, watch the tutorial video. Additionally, it may be necessary to use TTG XML Maker to create the sidecar files necessary for your Gallery Index to catalog your Flash galleries. TTG XML Maker is a free tool.

2) Embed your Flash galleries using TTG Stage, then place your exported TTG Stage galleries into the /galleries/ folder as described above.

Organize your galleries using sub-indices

TTG Pages includes one main Gallery Index.

Using TTG Auto Index, you can create additional index folders. Install these index folders into your /galleries/ folder to use them as sub-indices. Your image galleries then should be installed into the sub-index folders, rather than into the main /galleries/ folder.

When doing this, be sure to adjust your site menu links to accommodate the fact that your galleries are now one level deeper in the folder hierarchy. Using the default relative URLs for your menu items, you would simply change “../../about.html” so that it steps back one additional folder, becoming “../../../about.html”.

As you can see, we are simply adding one more “../” to the front of the URL; do this for each menu item in your image galleries only. The menus created by TTG Pages and TTG Auto Index will be fine using the default settings.

Summary

In this article, I have attempted to familiarize you with the basic concepts of combining the output from TTG web engines to create complete and optionally complex websites. We have covered:

• Creating a simple website using TTG Pages + TTG Highslide Gallery Pro
• Embedding Flash slideshows into your Home and About pages
• Using Flash galleries as your main image galleries
• Further organizing your image galleries by using sub-indices created with TTG Auto Index

I hope you have found this introductory tutorial helpful, and that it might have cleared up any of your preliminary questions regarding the use of TTG products.