The Art of Photography: A Review of Cen and its Potential as a Content Management System

I recently stumbled upon a new tool called Cen, which is designed to serve as a content management system. As someone who knows WordPress really well, I decided to give it a try and see how it compares. After spending some time with Cen, I think it's going to be a great option for non-techies, particularly those who want to create a simple website without having to delve into the technical details of database setup and plugin development.

One of my main reservations about Cen is that it's still in its early stages of development. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does mean that there are some limitations to what you can do with the platform. For example, there isn't a built-in commenting system, which might be a deal-breaker for some users. Additionally, Cen doesn't have a plugin architecture in place yet, which means you won't be able to easily add features like contact forms or SEO optimization. However, I think it's great that the developers are so focused on getting this right – if they can iron out these issues and continue to develop the platform, I have no doubt that Cen will become a top-notch content management system.

That being said, there are some concerns that I do have about using Cen. One of my main worries is what happens when the project gets taken over by someone else. As I mentioned earlier, developing software like this takes maintenance, updates, and a team of people to keep it running and adding new features. The developers behind Cen seem like they're doing things right – but I'm not sure if they have a funding model in place that will ensure the platform stays alive and well over time. Will they find a way to make money from this, or will they be reliant on donations or open-source contributions? These are questions that I don't have clear answers to yet.

Despite these concerns, I do think Cen has a lot of potential. One thing that's really impressive about the platform is how easy it is to use – even for non-techies like myself! The interface is clean and intuitive, making it easy to navigate and get started with creating content. Plus, there are a lot of features built-in, such as image galleries and sliders, which make it easy to create visually appealing websites.

One thing that I do want to mention is that Cen does crash and bog down if you're dealing with too many images or pushing it too hard. This is something that's true for any software – but the guys behind Cen seem like they're really on top of it, and I have no doubt that this will be worked out in the coming months.

If you're in the market for a content management system, I would definitely recommend checking out Cen. It's hosted, so you'll need to set up your own hosting – but Bluehost is a great option for beginners. The guys behind Cen seem like they're doing things right, and with some continued development and support, I think this platform could become a top contender in the CMS world.

Overall, my experience with Cen has been overwhelmingly positive. While there are definitely some limitations to what you can do with the platform – especially if you want more advanced features like plugins or commenting systems – I think it's a great option for those who want to create simple websites without having to delve into the technical details of website development. With some continued support and development, I have no doubt that Cen will become an excellent content management system.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we are going to talk about Cen what is Cen well the last couple episodes uh we've taken a little bit of a break but I want to come around to it today um we've talked about building websites for photography portfolios as you guys know I'm redoing mine and I thought it'd be beneficial to talk about on the show so we could all kind of learn about this together and talk about various things and we've talked a little bit about content Management systems and we've mentioned uh Solutions like Squarespace uh we've talked a little bit about WordPress uh we'll come back around to that and I did not know what coken was until a few weeks ago and credit where credit is due a couple people had left comments on YouTube and on the website and so I'll give shout out so specifically on YouTube it was Ali demon and siese puppy and on the website it was d-f who had mentioned Cen so I had no idea what this was I went and looked up and decided to discover cooken and was thoroughly impressed coken is basically it's an open source software it's like WordPress for photographers so you know on the Continuum of stuff we've talked about you want a Content management system because you want it to be easy to update your website you don't want that to be a burden or a hassle or an issue because if it is you probably won't ever do it um so you know on the one side of the spectrum you have something like Squarespace which is totally cool and awesome and the cool thing about Squarespace is it's all managed so you don't have to administrate a server you don't have to deal with code you don't have to deal with theming or anything like that you can simply just pay them for the service it is paid uh and you upload your images and you arrange your website and you're going you know no big deal on the other end of the spectrum you have something like WordPress which you know you're going to need web hosting for and you're probably going to need to know a little bit about WordPress um in terms of installing plugins and you're going to need to know a little bit about coding if you want to do any customization of it and so it's kind of the other end both are awesome Solutions but it just depends on the level of Technology you want to get into and how much fooling around you want to do um I think cocen is kind of somewhere in the middle it's a lot like Squarespace in terms of its Simplicity um its drag and drop interface it's got a beautiful design to it you can tell these are designers and real coders that built this it's amazing um something like WordPress um like I said it just requires a little more uh coken is a non-hosted solution so it is free but you download for their from their website which is ken. I'll have links in the show notes um and basically you'll need to go install this on a web server on a hosting service um I think the easiest ones I like to use is somebody like Blu host again I'll have a link in the show notes Blu host is is a very affordable uh for a couple bucks a month until you get web hosting and you can set this up on there you're going to need a database and it runs in a language called PHP um but the installation is really easy and I'm going to walk you through this today um a shout out real quick this is built by um the guys at Domin design um which I think have done a superb job on this I do have a couple little complaints and little things and I'll save those for the end of the show because they're really not deal breakers but some things I'd like to see with Coke and that it doesn't do so real quick why don't we go over to the computer and let's walk through the install process and have a look at what cocen is so come on over and Let's uh check it out okay so we are on the coken website and this is where you actually go to get your download of coken and the website URL is cooken ken. me so it's ken. me and uh head over there and you can download your your copy of cocen now I will say this too um go ahead and bookmark the website because they really do have excellent documentation on here they've got a good blog they have help forums all the stuff you need when you have questions and I've been here a couple times and when something's not obvious it's usually pretty easy to find in here so the website is very valuable from that standpoint um over here on the right there's a little orange button this says get cocen free we're going to scroll down and download link is right here so you're going to download your version of cooken now I am going to do a separate video on actually how to install this because I don't want I want to get in and start showing you Coke and I don't want to Der rail it right now um with getting into technical details so I will do a second video on that and so if you are looking for that um again the show notes on the website the art of photography. TV um just go to this episode and I will have everything there so this is how coken Works um I have a little local install setup of this and you can see I've already put some images in here but even the default theme here is really nice and clean now you're going to see some weirdness here because I've just been playing around with this so when I have captions that say blah or an image name that's really bizarre something like that just you know all this is editable so anyway we are on what the front end looks like so just a couple Concepts that that coken includes they do uh Pages you can do something called a timeline which is essentially like a Blog um it's a collection of posts that come in order by date um you can do albums which is really cool I only have one of them set up in here right now but we'll set another one up in a second uh you can do actual content which is going to be just your images and all this is customizable you can take this in and out um they have another thing called essays and so basically essays would be kind of like a Blog um but the timeline puts everything together so like maybe you do a blog post you put up a new Gallery so the allows people to see all that and so you can choose to display that on the website it's kind of cool um the other thing that's really cool about this is I put a YouTube video in here embedding is very nice so it it supports things like YouTube and Vimeo um SoundCloud stuff like that so if you have videos or anything like that if you do video work you want to embed that all you have to do is like throw in the link to the YouTube video and it figures it out it's really really quite easy uh and like I said this very impressive so what we're going to do is I'm going to go to the back end so we're going to go to uh the admin part of the website and again if you watch the setup video I will explain how to get to all these things uh cooken requires a login so let's go ahead and do my log in and go ahead and log in so here's what the backend looks like it's really cool kind of has a Lightroom feel to it which is pretty nice um essentially I'm going to show you the areas that cooken deals with and as you can see right now this is already pretty impressive uh up here on the top left navigation you have Library you have text site settings and upload the library is going to contain basically all the images and media that you upload it also does support video although for a variety of reasons mainly because of cost if you have something become popular I don't recommend hosting your own video um but your mileage may vary and that may be something for whatever reason you want to do and it does support it but images on the other hand you know knock yourself out it it's it's amazing so the library contains all of our images and I can click drag reorder select these whatever we'll come back to it in just a second you Al you can also do your tags here which is really cool um if I go over to text this basically deals with uh Pages you might write uh and what they call essays which is essentially a blog post and so I can go in here and I can write essays I can go in here and format my pages add new ones edit old ones if I go to my about page um you can double click go in here and look how cool the text editing is on here I mean it's it's clean it's beautiful uh well Aid out I can add an image to this page it it just it's really impressive the way the backend looks it's nice uh you can also do cool stuff like change it from black to white white to black if you you know prefer to write in the contrast equivalent um which is kind of cool you go over to your site settings you can control everything about your site what's in the navigation what order things come in you can even add custom CSS if you know what you're doing there and you want to add some custom style sheets um that's really cool uh we'll go over to settings uh settings allow you to change the console URL time zone you know put in your password again control uploading uh copyright right all that stuff image publishing site publishing Etc they do have a space in here for plugins and like I said the support right now is just not at the depth that something like WordPress is so you know it's not like you have thousands of contributors or hundreds of thousands of contributors so if you need an SEO Plugin or something like that it's it's not going to be as apparent but does have a plug-in architecture that supports it and like I say give coken one year and this will blow you away it's going to be outstanding um so anyway very cool they have all kinds of awesome stuff in here and then finally you can go to upload and I'm going to show you how easy it is to put images into cocen so let's move over here for just a second I have a folder full of demo images and I've got some basic images here that we're going to upload and I'm going to show you how easy this is and by the way look at these folks this was taken at the Art of Photography Meetup in New York so you might know some of these people if you were there anyway kind of fun I haven't posted these yet and actually this it just happens to be in this folder I wasn't going to use it for the demo but anyway meetups they're the best so let's drag three images I'm going to literally drag and drop these onto the browser I'm going to come over it says three items are ready for upload when complete set their visibility to public unlisted private whatever you want which is kind of cool it gives you that option let's go and start the upload doesn't really matter right now um and you give it a couple minutes and what it does is it's going to upload and create rendition sets of all these images now what is a rendition set a rendition set is all the thumbnails all the smaller sizes all the retina display images all that good stuff and so you don't have to go do those yourself and I should say too I'm rambling away here but cocen also this is very impressive it has not only mobile but retina support on here too so if you're using one of the MacBook uh Pro computers that has a retina screen or even an iPhone or an iPad that has retina um you don't have to worry about the images looking pixelly C and handles all that for you so once I have my images uploaded I can come over here and select one of these images and I can deal with titles and captions and let's go ahead and title and caption a few of these these are all artist portraits that I've done at the Museum so this is uh Korean artist or Japanese Korean artist leuan so let's go ahead and label that lean and uh uh and I'll just put a caption on here so we can see what it is this is a caption I know it's real creative um Lee showing his Infinity painting from the mid '70s I don't remember when it was' 7s so we'll leave it at that and uh I think we're done there we can go in here we can change visibility the copyright license we can do categories tags a very impressive assortment of stuff here so we're going to go ahead and leave that one be let's go over here this is an image of Mark Bradford so I'll label that Mark Bradford that's his portrait and then let's go ahead and this was actually Jean Paul gotier when the time I got to film him Jean Paul gotier gota there we go so we have some stuff labeled and uh then what we can do now now is if you go over to this view site button here it's going to take us to view the site and you're probably wondering well wait a minute where are the images what what happened okay well it published them here into the timeline and you can see that it did these three separate images but what if let's say oh this is really cool too I don't know if you noticed that but it does the infinity infinite sorry Infinity scrolling so basically um I'm running a local version of this right now but if you're online it only loads what you're looking at uh which makes your page load faster um you know it only loads once you scroll down to load the other images so just something worth noting there uh but what if I want to create a gallery with all these in it or I want to do an album so let's go ahead and close or I'll go back over here to the admin page what we are going to do is I'm going to go over here under the collections Tab and we can see there's public collections uh stuff like that what we want to do is add a new one so I'm going to collect the plus button and we're going to do a new album for grouping content or you can do a set if you want to group albums which is kind of cool and let's just title this artist portraits and you can add description uh portraits of let's spell it right of artists I have made I don't know whatever anyway and there are more properties you can add as well summaries tags categories Etc let's go ahead and say create album and it will create an empty album what I'm going to do is let's go back under all content and we can sort this from maybe last upload it'll just give us a three-way upload I'm going to actually select the first one I'm going to hold the shift key down on the keyboard and select all three so basically I just hit the last one I'm going to click and drag these down to artist portraits ladies and gentlemen it is that easy I just created a gallery called artist portraits so this is now going to be live on our website so it's very cool so let's go ahead and view site we're going to go over here and I'm going to say albums and look at that artist portraits it's right there what if you want to change the order of these oh by the way when you open them up look all the titles and captions came in just right if I select one of these again it's going to open in its own p page and you can also say view in light box and it will open it up full screen so anyway really nice and this is just this theme I'll show you some other themes in a second but let's say I want to reorder some things let's go back over here you can reorder images just as simple as clicking and dragging them so if I want Lee in the middle or if I want Johan Paul gotier in the beginning you know whatever I want to do I want to add another image to it and these portraits I did at Jim hes let's grab one of them going to click and drag it and it copied it over to artist portraits kind of out of place cuz it's color and the rest of the black and white but it works um anyway I just click to view site and you can see now that when I go over two albums they are automatically resorted and my new image was added so anyway really really cool stuff um another thing I want to show you about this is how easy it is it does support theming to change themes and coken does ship with a handful of themes in here so if I go over to site it's up on the top left hand side here if you go over to site and I'm going to get rid of the custom CSS thing for right now and what I'm going to do is I'm going to click here on the bottom you're going to see a couple things there's live and here's themes so let's let's go ahead and select themes and look you have all these themes to choose from I can choose Boulevard sometimes it'll tell you if it doesn't support something in here like you need to go redo something for the theme which is really nice let's say browse all themes uh let's pick I don't know Regal let's see what that looks like yeah okay fine I can use that theme and uh you can create a new draft or use the save draft and let's go ahead say publish changes and yes change it and let's view the site and theming is as easy as that um again Mobile support So if I resize the screen everything's going to chop down for a mobile look at that so if you're on an iPhone or something like that much like Squarespace does it goes ahead and reconfigures itself so anyway really really cool um I really love Cen it's amazing let's go back over I want to change my theme back actually so we'll go back up under themes and I'm going to go back to Elementary which was the theme I was using let's say use theme and I'm going to say used save draft because it's the last one I used let's go and publish changes and we're done yes change it okay so it's really pretty intuitive really pretty easy to do another thing that I want to talk about is this idea of featured content and basically if I go over to say view site um that means what's on this homepage here so I have this kind of Carousel wait for to load of images that are going to change in and out here so I've selected some images to be featured content so you know you might not want that to necessarily correlate to an album that you've done you might want it to be different things you've done something like that so let's go back over to cooken here and for Featured content you can select it I'm under Library I'm on the right hand side so if I go to all content and I take like this image of Mark Bradford here and let's drag this over to featured content now when I click on featured content let's reorder it so we'll see it first and really folks that's as easy as it is let's view site and you can see now that that Mark Bradford image is the first one that loads so I really I mean Cen is very impressive it's cool um I'll do a second video of how to install it which is also very impressive of how easy that is so check that out too um I don't have a whole lot of reservations for it other than the stuff I talked about uh we're going to close the video with a few things here um you know some reasons to why you might want to use this or might want not want to use it but I am very impressed with this as you can see just for the backend alone it's totally worth downloading and checking out for free it's it's simply beautiful and uh I think these guys um have just done a fantastic job with this so that in a nutshell is coken okay so that is basically coken which is an awesome project it is free it is an open source license you're not allowed to sell it but you are allowed to download and use it even if it's for professional reasons um cooken like I said it's built by the guys at Domin design and you know I'm going to be a little bit critical on them here I first of all let me get out of the way they've done a beautiful job in case you can't tell that I'm enthusiastic about it already I'm even considering going ahead and using this for my website instead of Wordpress and that's a huge deal because I do know WordPress really well and I think I'm going to give this a try um we'll see how it goes but I'm going to go ahead and start developing a little bit with it um I think Cen is very good for non- techies if you can get past just basically how to set up a database which is pretty easy and how to connect COC and it does everything for you the only reservations I have about it um and this is not a bad thing but it is still missing some stuff for instance there's not a built-in commenting system if you're interested in having comments on photos that may or may not be a big deal for some people um it's missing a system for plugins at this point which is still one of the things that WordPress really does well is that you know if I need a plugin for a contact form or some kind of SEO optimization or you know all the things you can get plugins for you know WordPress has that architecture there uh again learning curve so if that is a big deal to you you'll know that that's something you want and you may or not may or may not miss it with something like cooken um but I will say this if you give these guys another year of development on this they will have all this stuff figured out um for a first release and technically it still is in beta uh it's very very impressive uh you don't see a lot of people developing at this quality the only other concern I have and I may be completely wrong on this but it seems like um this this is what happens and I have had experience with this but a lot of times when you develop something that you want to be downloaded for free and the term open source kind of comes up and in all fairness Cen has has not used the word open source on their website but you know software takes maintenance it takes a lot of updating it takes a lot of people to kind of you know Foster the software and make it work and keep it updated keep it running add new features Etc and I don't know what their funding model is for cooken because they're giving it away and they might have a funding model for it so again I'm just kind of speculating here but this is a concern is I don't want to see support dropped for Coke and like you know oh my gosh this was a cool project while we were all into it but now it's kind of Fallen by the wayside so be neat to either see them get some kind of funding model like WordPress has where they offer like a hosted version or something like that or uh go ahead and open source it to the community and let various people work on it and keep it alive that way so it's going to need something along those lines otherwise I'm concerned that three people aren't going to want to do this forever particularly people who are really good designers like this they'll want to do new stuff um but anyway that's just a small critique and like I said I don't know for sure any of that stuff so I'm just speculating based on what I've seen on the website they don't really share a lot about their funding model their business model but Cen is a wonderful uh app to use um you know and I I definitely recommend going and having a look and downloading it like I said I think I'm going to use this for my site um I'm about 90% sure I'm going to go ahead and start working with it and check it out and this just may be what goes up because it really is pretty exciting the only downside that I've noticed and again put this in that section of what they're going to do in the next year that's going to work itself out but um if you really start pushing it you have a lot of images in there and you're really going crazy with it it does start to crash and bog down on you um but like I said the guys that put this together you can tell they're really really good coders and really good designers and stuff like that that's buggy is a total challenge for any coder and they will get this worked out like I said give them a year and this is going to be very impressive so anyway that's another solution you guys can look at if you're into content Management Systems like I said this is hosted so you will have to have hosting for it sorry it is not hosted you will need hosting so uh check out Bluehost something like that I'll have links in the show notes below so you can go see what they're all about in fact I've I've done other videos on things just like blue host and you know go ahead and set up some hosting and and check it out for yourself and uh anyway once again guys this has been the Art of Photography thanks for watching I will see you guys next time laterhey everybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we are going to talk about Cen what is Cen well the last couple episodes uh we've taken a little bit of a break but I want to come around to it today um we've talked about building websites for photography portfolios as you guys know I'm redoing mine and I thought it'd be beneficial to talk about on the show so we could all kind of learn about this together and talk about various things and we've talked a little bit about content Management systems and we've mentioned uh Solutions like Squarespace uh we've talked a little bit about WordPress uh we'll come back around to that and I did not know what coken was until a few weeks ago and credit where credit is due a couple people had left comments on YouTube and on the website and so I'll give shout out so specifically on YouTube it was Ali demon and siese puppy and on the website it was d-f who had mentioned Cen so I had no idea what this was I went and looked up and decided to discover cooken and was thoroughly impressed coken is basically it's an open source software it's like WordPress for photographers so you know on the Continuum of stuff we've talked about you want a Content management system because you want it to be easy to update your website you don't want that to be a burden or a hassle or an issue because if it is you probably won't ever do it um so you know on the one side of the spectrum you have something like Squarespace which is totally cool and awesome and the cool thing about Squarespace is it's all managed so you don't have to administrate a server you don't have to deal with code you don't have to deal with theming or anything like that you can simply just pay them for the service it is paid uh and you upload your images and you arrange your website and you're going you know no big deal on the other end of the spectrum you have something like WordPress which you know you're going to need web hosting for and you're probably going to need to know a little bit about WordPress um in terms of installing plugins and you're going to need to know a little bit about coding if you want to do any customization of it and so it's kind of the other end both are awesome Solutions but it just depends on the level of Technology you want to get into and how much fooling around you want to do um I think cocen is kind of somewhere in the middle it's a lot like Squarespace in terms of its Simplicity um its drag and drop interface it's got a beautiful design to it you can tell these are designers and real coders that built this it's amazing um something like WordPress um like I said it just requires a little more uh coken is a non-hosted solution so it is free but you download for their from their website which is ken. I'll have links in the show notes um and basically you'll need to go install this on a web server on a hosting service um I think the easiest ones I like to use is somebody like Blu host again I'll have a link in the show notes Blu host is is a very affordable uh for a couple bucks a month until you get web hosting and you can set this up on there you're going to need a database and it runs in a language called PHP um but the installation is really easy and I'm going to walk you through this today um a shout out real quick this is built by um the guys at Domin design um which I think have done a superb job on this I do have a couple little complaints and little things and I'll save those for the end of the show because they're really not deal breakers but some things I'd like to see with Coke and that it doesn't do so real quick why don't we go over to the computer and let's walk through the install process and have a look at what cocen is so come on over and Let's uh check it out okay so we are on the coken website and this is where you actually go to get your download of coken and the website URL is cooken ken. me so it's ken. me and uh head over there and you can download your your copy of cocen now I will say this too um go ahead and bookmark the website because they really do have excellent documentation on here they've got a good blog they have help forums all the stuff you need when you have questions and I've been here a couple times and when something's not obvious it's usually pretty easy to find in here so the website is very valuable from that standpoint um over here on the right there's a little orange button this says get cocen free we're going to scroll down and download link is right here so you're going to download your version of cooken now I am going to do a separate video on actually how to install this because I don't want I want to get in and start showing you Coke and I don't want to Der rail it right now um with getting into technical details so I will do a second video on that and so if you are looking for that um again the show notes on the website the art of photography. TV um just go to this episode and I will have everything there so this is how coken Works um I have a little local install setup of this and you can see I've already put some images in here but even the default theme here is really nice and clean now you're going to see some weirdness here because I've just been playing around with this so when I have captions that say blah or an image name that's really bizarre something like that just you know all this is editable so anyway we are on what the front end looks like so just a couple Concepts that that coken includes they do uh Pages you can do something called a timeline which is essentially like a Blog um it's a collection of posts that come in order by date um you can do albums which is really cool I only have one of them set up in here right now but we'll set another one up in a second uh you can do actual content which is going to be just your images and all this is customizable you can take this in and out um they have another thing called essays and so basically essays would be kind of like a Blog um but the timeline puts everything together so like maybe you do a blog post you put up a new Gallery so the allows people to see all that and so you can choose to display that on the website it's kind of cool um the other thing that's really cool about this is I put a YouTube video in here embedding is very nice so it it supports things like YouTube and Vimeo um SoundCloud stuff like that so if you have videos or anything like that if you do video work you want to embed that all you have to do is like throw in the link to the YouTube video and it figures it out it's really really quite easy uh and like I said this very impressive so what we're going to do is I'm going to go to the back end so we're going to go to uh the admin part of the website and again if you watch the setup video I will explain how to get to all these things uh cooken requires a login so let's go ahead and do my log in and go ahead and log in so here's what the backend looks like it's really cool kind of has a Lightroom feel to it which is pretty nice um essentially I'm going to show you the areas that cooken deals with and as you can see right now this is already pretty impressive uh up here on the top left navigation you have Library you have text site settings and upload the library is going to contain basically all the images and media that you upload it also does support video although for a variety of reasons mainly because of cost if you have something become popular I don't recommend hosting your own video um but your mileage may vary and that may be something for whatever reason you want to do and it does support it but images on the other hand you know knock yourself out it it's it's amazing so the library contains all of our images and I can click drag reorder select these whatever we'll come back to it in just a second you Al you can also do your tags here which is really cool um if I go over to text this basically deals with uh Pages you might write uh and what they call essays which is essentially a blog post and so I can go in here and I can write essays I can go in here and format my pages add new ones edit old ones if I go to my about page um you can double click go in here and look how cool the text editing is on here I mean it's it's clean it's beautiful uh well Aid out I can add an image to this page it it just it's really impressive the way the backend looks it's nice uh you can also do cool stuff like change it from black to white white to black if you you know prefer to write in the contrast equivalent um which is kind of cool you go over to your site settings you can control everything about your site what's in the navigation what order things come in you can even add custom CSS if you know what you're doing there and you want to add some custom style sheets um that's really cool uh we'll go over to settings uh settings allow you to change the console URL time zone you know put in your password again control uploading uh copyright right all that stuff image publishing site publishing Etc they do have a space in here for plugins and like I said the support right now is just not at the depth that something like WordPress is so you know it's not like you have thousands of contributors or hundreds of thousands of contributors so if you need an SEO Plugin or something like that it's it's not going to be as apparent but does have a plug-in architecture that supports it and like I say give coken one year and this will blow you away it's going to be outstanding um so anyway very cool they have all kinds of awesome stuff in here and then finally you can go to upload and I'm going to show you how easy it is to put images into cocen so let's move over here for just a second I have a folder full of demo images and I've got some basic images here that we're going to upload and I'm going to show you how easy this is and by the way look at these folks this was taken at the Art of Photography Meetup in New York so you might know some of these people if you were there anyway kind of fun I haven't posted these yet and actually this it just happens to be in this folder I wasn't going to use it for the demo but anyway meetups they're the best so let's drag three images I'm going to literally drag and drop these onto the browser I'm going to come over it says three items are ready for upload when complete set their visibility to public unlisted private whatever you want which is kind of cool it gives you that option let's go and start the upload doesn't really matter right now um and you give it a couple minutes and what it does is it's going to upload and create rendition sets of all these images now what is a rendition set a rendition set is all the thumbnails all the smaller sizes all the retina display images all that good stuff and so you don't have to go do those yourself and I should say too I'm rambling away here but cocen also this is very impressive it has not only mobile but retina support on here too so if you're using one of the MacBook uh Pro computers that has a retina screen or even an iPhone or an iPad that has retina um you don't have to worry about the images looking pixelly C and handles all that for you so once I have my images uploaded I can come over here and select one of these images and I can deal with titles and captions and let's go ahead and title and caption a few of these these are all artist portraits that I've done at the Museum so this is uh Korean artist or Japanese Korean artist leuan so let's go ahead and label that lean and uh uh and I'll just put a caption on here so we can see what it is this is a caption I know it's real creative um Lee showing his Infinity painting from the mid '70s I don't remember when it was' 7s so we'll leave it at that and uh I think we're done there we can go in here we can change visibility the copyright license we can do categories tags a very impressive assortment of stuff here so we're going to go ahead and leave that one be let's go over here this is an image of Mark Bradford so I'll label that Mark Bradford that's his portrait and then let's go ahead and this was actually Jean Paul gotier when the time I got to film him Jean Paul gotier gota there we go so we have some stuff labeled and uh then what we can do now now is if you go over to this view site button here it's going to take us to view the site and you're probably wondering well wait a minute where are the images what what happened okay well it published them here into the timeline and you can see that it did these three separate images but what if let's say oh this is really cool too I don't know if you noticed that but it does the infinity infinite sorry Infinity scrolling so basically um I'm running a local version of this right now but if you're online it only loads what you're looking at uh which makes your page load faster um you know it only loads once you scroll down to load the other images so just something worth noting there uh but what if I want to create a gallery with all these in it or I want to do an album so let's go ahead and close or I'll go back over here to the admin page what we are going to do is I'm going to go over here under the collections Tab and we can see there's public collections uh stuff like that what we want to do is add a new one so I'm going to collect the plus button and we're going to do a new album for grouping content or you can do a set if you want to group albums which is kind of cool and let's just title this artist portraits and you can add description uh portraits of let's spell it right of artists I have made I don't know whatever anyway and there are more properties you can add as well summaries tags categories Etc let's go ahead and say create album and it will create an empty album what I'm going to do is let's go back under all content and we can sort this from maybe last upload it'll just give us a three-way upload I'm going to actually select the first one I'm going to hold the shift key down on the keyboard and select all three so basically I just hit the last one I'm going to click and drag these down to artist portraits ladies and gentlemen it is that easy I just created a gallery called artist portraits so this is now going to be live on our website so it's very cool so let's go ahead and view site we're going to go over here and I'm going to say albums and look at that artist portraits it's right there what if you want to change the order of these oh by the way when you open them up look all the titles and captions came in just right if I select one of these again it's going to open in its own p page and you can also say view in light box and it will open it up full screen so anyway really nice and this is just this theme I'll show you some other themes in a second but let's say I want to reorder some things let's go back over here you can reorder images just as simple as clicking and dragging them so if I want Lee in the middle or if I want Johan Paul gotier in the beginning you know whatever I want to do I want to add another image to it and these portraits I did at Jim hes let's grab one of them going to click and drag it and it copied it over to artist portraits kind of out of place cuz it's color and the rest of the black and white but it works um anyway I just click to view site and you can see now that when I go over two albums they are automatically resorted and my new image was added so anyway really really cool stuff um another thing I want to show you about this is how easy it is it does support theming to change themes and coken does ship with a handful of themes in here so if I go over to site it's up on the top left hand side here if you go over to site and I'm going to get rid of the custom CSS thing for right now and what I'm going to do is I'm going to click here on the bottom you're going to see a couple things there's live and here's themes so let's let's go ahead and select themes and look you have all these themes to choose from I can choose Boulevard sometimes it'll tell you if it doesn't support something in here like you need to go redo something for the theme which is really nice let's say browse all themes uh let's pick I don't know Regal let's see what that looks like yeah okay fine I can use that theme and uh you can create a new draft or use the save draft and let's go ahead say publish changes and yes change it and let's view the site and theming is as easy as that um again Mobile support So if I resize the screen everything's going to chop down for a mobile look at that so if you're on an iPhone or something like that much like Squarespace does it goes ahead and reconfigures itself so anyway really really cool um I really love Cen it's amazing let's go back over I want to change my theme back actually so we'll go back up under themes and I'm going to go back to Elementary which was the theme I was using let's say use theme and I'm going to say used save draft because it's the last one I used let's go and publish changes and we're done yes change it okay so it's really pretty intuitive really pretty easy to do another thing that I want to talk about is this idea of featured content and basically if I go over to say view site um that means what's on this homepage here so I have this kind of Carousel wait for to load of images that are going to change in and out here so I've selected some images to be featured content so you know you might not want that to necessarily correlate to an album that you've done you might want it to be different things you've done something like that so let's go back over to cooken here and for Featured content you can select it I'm under Library I'm on the right hand side so if I go to all content and I take like this image of Mark Bradford here and let's drag this over to featured content now when I click on featured content let's reorder it so we'll see it first and really folks that's as easy as it is let's view site and you can see now that that Mark Bradford image is the first one that loads so I really I mean Cen is very impressive it's cool um I'll do a second video of how to install it which is also very impressive of how easy that is so check that out too um I don't have a whole lot of reservations for it other than the stuff I talked about uh we're going to close the video with a few things here um you know some reasons to why you might want to use this or might want not want to use it but I am very impressed with this as you can see just for the backend alone it's totally worth downloading and checking out for free it's it's simply beautiful and uh I think these guys um have just done a fantastic job with this so that in a nutshell is coken okay so that is basically coken which is an awesome project it is free it is an open source license you're not allowed to sell it but you are allowed to download and use it even if it's for professional reasons um cooken like I said it's built by the guys at Domin design and you know I'm going to be a little bit critical on them here I first of all let me get out of the way they've done a beautiful job in case you can't tell that I'm enthusiastic about it already I'm even considering going ahead and using this for my website instead of Wordpress and that's a huge deal because I do know WordPress really well and I think I'm going to give this a try um we'll see how it goes but I'm going to go ahead and start developing a little bit with it um I think Cen is very good for non- techies if you can get past just basically how to set up a database which is pretty easy and how to connect COC and it does everything for you the only reservations I have about it um and this is not a bad thing but it is still missing some stuff for instance there's not a built-in commenting system if you're interested in having comments on photos that may or may not be a big deal for some people um it's missing a system for plugins at this point which is still one of the things that WordPress really does well is that you know if I need a plugin for a contact form or some kind of SEO optimization or you know all the things you can get plugins for you know WordPress has that architecture there uh again learning curve so if that is a big deal to you you'll know that that's something you want and you may or not may or may not miss it with something like cooken um but I will say this if you give these guys another year of development on this they will have all this stuff figured out um for a first release and technically it still is in beta uh it's very very impressive uh you don't see a lot of people developing at this quality the only other concern I have and I may be completely wrong on this but it seems like um this this is what happens and I have had experience with this but a lot of times when you develop something that you want to be downloaded for free and the term open source kind of comes up and in all fairness Cen has has not used the word open source on their website but you know software takes maintenance it takes a lot of updating it takes a lot of people to kind of you know Foster the software and make it work and keep it updated keep it running add new features Etc and I don't know what their funding model is for cooken because they're giving it away and they might have a funding model for it so again I'm just kind of speculating here but this is a concern is I don't want to see support dropped for Coke and like you know oh my gosh this was a cool project while we were all into it but now it's kind of Fallen by the wayside so be neat to either see them get some kind of funding model like WordPress has where they offer like a hosted version or something like that or uh go ahead and open source it to the community and let various people work on it and keep it alive that way so it's going to need something along those lines otherwise I'm concerned that three people aren't going to want to do this forever particularly people who are really good designers like this they'll want to do new stuff um but anyway that's just a small critique and like I said I don't know for sure any of that stuff so I'm just speculating based on what I've seen on the website they don't really share a lot about their funding model their business model but Cen is a wonderful uh app to use um you know and I I definitely recommend going and having a look and downloading it like I said I think I'm going to use this for my site um I'm about 90% sure I'm going to go ahead and start working with it and check it out and this just may be what goes up because it really is pretty exciting the only downside that I've noticed and again put this in that section of what they're going to do in the next year that's going to work itself out but um if you really start pushing it you have a lot of images in there and you're really going crazy with it it does start to crash and bog down on you um but like I said the guys that put this together you can tell they're really really good coders and really good designers and stuff like that that's buggy is a total challenge for any coder and they will get this worked out like I said give them a year and this is going to be very impressive so anyway that's another solution you guys can look at if you're into content Management Systems like I said this is hosted so you will have to have hosting for it sorry it is not hosted you will need hosting so uh check out Bluehost something like that I'll have links in the show notes below so you can go see what they're all about in fact I've I've done other videos on things just like blue host and you know go ahead and set up some hosting and and check it out for yourself and uh anyway once again guys this has been the Art of Photography thanks for watching I will see you guys next time later\n"