This was a medium scale CMS project for the Coastal Arts League of Half Moon Bay, CA. The gallery hosts an annual photographic competition - the Michael H. Kellicutt International Photo Show.

What they needed initially was an online submission form so that artists could submit their work to the show and enter the competition. The form needed to check to make sure the address was valid and that the submitted files were of the correct size and format. It also needed to calculate the contest entry fee based on the number of submissions and create a PayPal button. PayPal's Instant Payment Notification was utilized so that once payment cleared through PayPal the entry would be automatically entered into the contest database.

A short time afterward I was contacted again to build an admin backend to handle the juror voting and selection as well as managing entrants, submissions & jurors with CSV import and export functionality.

The competition this year had 527 entrants and just over 1,800 submissions. Each submission would need to be rated by at least 3 jurors.

The back end consisted of a "payments pending" table for users who opted to pay by check, a juror management section which allowed the administrator to add, delete and assign jurors to groups. There was a pool of about 14 jurors. Jurors in the same group would be assigned to the same set of images to vote on, group 1 would get the first 250 submissions, group 2 the next 250 and so on. A summary view showed how each group was progressing. Once a juror had voted on every entry in a group they became free to join the next group.

After preliminary juror voting was completed, a subset of the entire batch of entries was marked as 'promoted' and voted upon by the Final Jurors. These final jurors could rate and make selections. Selected images would appear in the show.

My final task for this project was building a section of the admin page to create the gallery. This allowed the editing of title and process for each image (through AJAX, to save some time) and the artist info. It also provided a means to mark a submission as 1st, 2nd, 3rd place or Honorable mention, "hang" which means it's hanging in the show, or "book" meaning that it appears in a display book. An artist statement and juror comments could also be attached to each entry. After all the information is entered, the gallery pages can be rendered with a few mouse clicks. Since artists can specify at the time of submission what contact information the do and do not want to appear with their work, the render script needed to account for this.

You can view the end result for yourself at the link below.

Url: http://www.coastalartsleague.com/kellicutt/2009/DisplayBook/index.html

Tags: php, mysql, applications, automation, html, css, javascript