I haven’t spent much time thinking about it quite yet, but combining FoxyCart with Menalto Gallery 3 might actually work.

There are several photo store applications available, but most seem to have been built when html tables were still the only way. This means that lots of the backend is most likely a bit shotty, old, or just plain no fun to use.

The new Gallery 3 is looking really nice! It’s built on Kohana PHP, which means it shouldn’t be too much trouble to tap into it. Kohana was originally based on CodeIngiter, so it should work pretty similarly.

Of course a stable release of G3 is still a ways off, but I think this bridge is worth looking into right away. Since G3 can manage all the albums, collections, etc, then maybe this bridge could work nicely. But, maybe not.

Delivery

The first major concern I see is how to handle the delivery of the files after purchase. FoxyCart can call external scripts at certain points during checkout, so that shouldn’t be a problem. And since Kohana allows for hooks, handling the delivery should just be a matter of coding the download scripts and setting up the calls.

Shopping experience

Is G3 really the best choice for a cart? I’m not too sure. It’ll certainly be helpful for the store admin, since the admin I’m building for uses Aperture, and the Aperture Gallery module will most likely be updated for G3.

In addition, G3 offers lots of other really nice stuff when it comes to displaying, prepping, and working with photos on the web. I have a feeling that the theme could dictate greatly the shopping experience for users, so it’s quite possible that this idea isn’t too far fetched.

We’ll see how it goes…