Media Gallery

The media gallery control when embedded into a page provides visitors to the website with a straight-forward means of viewing multiple images in a gallery format.  The control utilises a combination of components that you can see from the screenshot opposite including;

• Automatic paging
• RSS/Atom feeds
• Lightbox functionality
• Image download option

Using the Lightbox functionality to display the images means that users don't need to close and then open up another thumbnail; there are simple controls to scroll through the gallery one by one without having to click unnecessary.

If website visitors have been given the option to download images, then when they stumble upon an image they want to keep, there is a simple download button. 

The media gallery control is one of the Contensis standard listing controls.  It is dedicated to serving images and/or FLV files.  You can embed an image gallery in either a web page or a template that can be used in multiple pages.

Combined with other Contensis functionality such as Batch Upload (uploading a zip file with structure and media files), you can create a fully functional media gallery in a matter of minutes.

Filtering

As with all Contensis listing controls it is possible to apply filters to determine what images/FLVs are displayed in the gallery.  Filtering is possible by various means including:

• Folder/location within the content hierarchy
• Tagging/classification
• Combination of the above

Advanced filtering can be put in place to achieve galleries that could contain the latest 10 FLV files uploaded with a specified tag.

For a web developer the media gallery can be embedded into your pages with just a couple of clicks.  It uses the standard themes approach so it is straight-forward to adjust the look and feel so that it is a perfect fit and slots into the rest of the design of your website.

You can extend the filtering of the media gallery to make it more personalised by adding dynamic filters, e.g. in an intranet scenario display all images that have been uploaded by my department.  Another option provided by dynamic filtering is the ability to present the media gallery as a template which is geared up to automatically render the media that is stored in a relative location.

This approach can be used with many different Contensis controls, means that content editors can create a new media gallery within a section of their site with a single selection with all the configuration work taken care for them.

And if you really have the need to extend its functionality then this is possible as well, since it is a standard .Net control that you can inherit from.