I am very interested in the Tellico platform and would like to know how usable/customizable it might be for a slightly different use.
I am organizing a school system's warehouse of books and items used for their dance, theater, music and arts activities. Music will have sub categories such as: instruments, scores, books…
Theater will have sub categories such as: books, costumes, props…; and sub subcategories related i.e. to costumes such as: color, size, long, short, good conditions, repair needed…
I would also to be able to upload images of the items and have a social media section with a blog, a photo gallery, a forum and links to related school web sites.
I would like to use the platform as a searchable database to:
• keep inventory organized in different categories such as: Music; Theater; Dance; Visual Arts; Library; Miscellaneous...
• Allow teachers and administrators to see what is in the warehouse, search, reserve and eventually, borrow items
• Have a visual image next to each item listed in a catalog fashion when a viewer browses or searches
• Possibly have a PDF format visual catalog to look through when off the system
• Have our own named categories sub-categories and sort criteria (measurements, color, etc.)
• Have a central web page that talks about how to use the warehouse and the Tellico system
• Hopefully be able to have some social aspects to the site where teachers can interact in a forum of some kind to share ideas around the props and items we have in the warehouse and ideas for new shows and events
• It would also be great to have a gallery of some kind where the teachers can share images from the events and shows of the kids
I am wondering if Tellico is customizable enough to basically handle those needs. We need the cataloging and borrowing and searching functions and so the platform seems great. Is it possible to customize Tellico present features and capabilities and add different categories to match our needs?
Thank you and I appreciate any insight anyone may offer

have read over their documentation? here's a start http://tellico-project.org/about-tellico
custom collections are available, and various exports are available as well.

depending on your distribution, the installation is likely not a far off step.

From your description, I doubt Tellico is the right software to do the job. It doesn't really have anything to do with websites (other than HTMl export) so blogs, forums, galleries, etc. are out.

It doesn't handle anything hierarchical, so sub-categories would be out. You can have any keyword or category label you want, but it's only a free vocabulary.

Consider Tellico just a simple database app, it's not really a platform of any kind.

Your project seems to require a full fledged database system.

Tellico is more for personal collection database, which is perfect for my usage. I had been implementing my own database of collections with custom logic and GUI until tellico came about. I immediately transferred my data over to tellico and scrapped my custom database.