Orientation

You’re new, and you probably have a lot of questions. We’re here to help. In this article, I’ll give you a brief summary of what each of our key plugins are about.

But first, you should know that we have comprehensive online documentation packed with good information. We often publish tutorials and tips on our blog, full of good examples and advice. And when you have questions, our helpful community of developers and users can usually point you in the right direction.

If you’re new to Lightroom’s Web module and/or The Turning Gate’s plugins, you should definitely have a look at the Foundations section of our documentation. The articles there are a great way to get up-to-speed on the basics.

And when you get started building with TTG for the first time, we have a beginner’s walkthrough to building a website which lays down the basics pretty well.

About our plugins

TTG plugins are extremely flexible in design and purpose. Each of our plugins may be used independently, or you may combine plugins in building-block fashion to create entire websites. How you use the plugins, and what you build with them is entirely up to you.

TTG CE2 Pages

If you want to build a website, TTG CE2 Pages is the place to start. This plugin lays the foundation for your website and includes six pages: Home, Galleries, Services, Info, About and Contact. The Home page supports various slideshow options, and the Contact page includes an email contact form. The Services, Info and About pages are generic pages you may use for any purpose. The Galleries page helps you to organize and navigate your image galleries, and makes adding galleries to your site an easy task.

Our Image Galleries

There are currently three image gallery plug-ins available for CE2. Ideally, the choice between galleries should be a matter of presentation, not of features. To that end, we have strived to keep the gallery feature sets as parallel as possible. All of our image galleries support basic presentation and e-commerce features, and include support for mobile devices. The best way to choose a gallery is to try our demonstrations and decide which you like best.

TTG CE2 Highslide Gallery is a thumbnail-grid gallery that presents large images in a modal overlay with slideshow controls.

TTG CE2 Horizon is a classic horizontal-scrolling gallery.

TTG CE2 Photoswipe Gallery is another thumbnail-grid gallery that presents large images in a full-screen environment, with optional zooming and basic slideshow controls.

Client Proofing

TTG CE2 Client Response Gallery is one of our most applauded image galleries, and serves to facilitate communication between the client and the photographer. It allows the photographer to post a gallery of images from which clients may select their favorites or offer various kinds of feedback. That feedback is received in the photographer’s email, often with a comma-separated list of relevant image file names, which are easily copy-and-pasted from the email into Lightroom’s filters to quickly isolate those images in the library.

E-Commerce

For those wanting to sell their imagery online, all of the above galleries support two e-commerce types, Fotomoto integration and our own TTG shopping cart.

Fotomoto services integrate with Fotomoto.com. Signup is free, and the service allows photographers to sell images directly from their websites using Fotomoto’s checkout system. Fotomoto processes payments, prints your images, and ships the order directly to the buyer. A wide selection of product types are available. It’s a hands-off process, and very convenient for photographers preferring to avoid the minutia of order fulfillment.

TTG CE2 Cart is The Turning Gate’s proprietary, self-managed shopping cart system. It works in tandem with your image galleries, allowing orders to be placed directly from your site. Cart setup is extremely flexible, and ordering and invoice delivery are reliable and secure. The cart may be configured to accept orders without payment, or to accept online payments via PayPal.

TTG CE2 Theme for WordPress

Blogging is an excellent way to keep your audience interested in your work and coming back to your site, and dramatically improves your search engine ranking. WordPress is one of the most popular and powerful free blogging platforms available, and with TTG CE2 Theme for WordPress you are able to design a blog that perfectly matches the design of your website and image galleries.

TTG CE2 Auto Index

TTG CE2 Auto Index creates dynamic, self-populating indexes for multiple image galleries. It allows you to organize your image galleries, and makes it easy to add new galleries to your site. TTG CE2 Pages includes one dedicated auto index; TTG CE2 Auto Index allows you to create as many indexes as you like and serves myriad purposes.

TTG CE2 Stage

The swiss army knife of TTG plugins, TTG CE2 Stage can:

• Display HTML slideshows for desktops and mobile devices.
• Embed Flash image galleries with support for iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.
• Embed video from Vimeo and YouTube, or locally hosted video using the HTML5 video spec; all video may be viewed on desktop machines or mobile devices.
• Create before/after image comparisons for processing or retouching demonstrations.
• Be used in conjunction with TTG CE2 Cart to create a product page for any type of item.
• Be used to create additional pages for websites created with TTG CE2 Pages.
• Be plied to many additional uses as needed …