Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow

por | 3 julio, 2006
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Welcome. This is the official page for the Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow – WordPress 2 plugin.

This is my very first attempt at a WordPress plugin, so please be understanding if things are a bit buggy. I’m learning as I go along. It is something that I found pretty useful so I thought I would develop it some and share it with others. I welcome any feedback, comments, and constructive criticism. So here goes…

Description of Plugin:
Some of the current WordPress/Gallery integrations (like WPG2) are nice, but I wanted something a little different. I wanted something a little more dynamic and aesthetically pleasing than just your standard image block. This plugin combines a neat DHTML Javascript Ultimate Fade-In Slideshow 1.5 and Gallery 2.x to form a nice slideshow for you to insert into your WordPress sidebar.

The plugin grabs a default of 20 (# is configurable) random thumbnails from the entire gallery and displays them. The thumbnails can be either portrait or landscape as you can see in the demo.

Demo:
Look to the right in this sidebar for the demo. :-)

This demo consists of a plain vanilla installation of WordPress 2.0.2. The only plugins activated are this one and WP Tiger Administration (to make sure my admin options page looks good). The gallery installed is 2.0.4 minimal package.

Requirements:

  • Wordress 2.x (obviously)
  • Gallery 2.x installation (I’ve tested successfully with 2.0.4 and 2.1-rc-2a)
  • Gallery database must be MySQL, although other ones are supported by Gallery
  • Some knowledge of the MySQL database used by Gallery 2.x

Installation:

  1. Download the plugin (ug2slideshow.zip).
  2. Unzip and upload the file ug2slideshow.php to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  3. Login to your Site-Admin and activate the plugin.
  4. In your Site-Admin, go the Options / UG2Slideshow Options subpage.
  5. Fill in the gallery2 database settings.
  6. Make sure you have both status statements say “Success!”
  7. Insert the following code into your template’s sidebar file: 
    <li>
    <h2>Slideshow</h2>
    <?php ug2slideshow_print(); ?>
</li>

Installation Notes & Tips

  • There are a few different Gallery2 MySQL database setups that are supported by this plugin. You will most likely fit in to one of these scenarios. And all are easily configured in the admin page.
    1. WordPress and Gallery2 are installed on the same webhost and on the same MySQL database. This should be the case if you are using the WPG2 plugin already. This is the easiest setup for this plugin and all you have to do is check the option in the admin page.
    2. WordPress and Gallery2 are installed on the same webhost but on different databases.
    3. WordPress and Gallery2 are installed on different webhosts and different databases.
  • In order to center your slideshow within your sidebar, surround the php code with <center><?php ug2slideshow(); ?></center> tags. Sorry, I know that its yucky deprecated tags, but I’m not too good at CSS and can’t figure out a way for it to work with the Javascript code.
  • The default settings for the display of the slideshow work nicely, but you can customize the options to your liking.
  • The default size for thumbnails in Gallery2 is 150 pixels, which works out nicely for this default WordPress theme. However, you may need to adjust both your Gallery2 thumbnail size and your sidebar width in order to make things work and look right.
  • Match the fade color with the background color of your sidebar or if you are having trouble, just use the default setting which is white.
  • Visit the Ultimate Fade-In Slideshow 1.5 page to see a list of the full features and the browser compatibility. From what I know it is compatible in IE5+, FF1+, NS6+, and Opera7+.