Flash slideshows are elements that add interactivity to your website. A Flash animation can be made from a set of images, manually by using a specialized software or automatically with scripts. The owners of an WordPress blog might have noticed the fact that there are not so many plugins or code examples which would dramatically simplifies the inclusion of a Flash slideshow into the posts, sidebars or in the blog header. Fortunately, a rapid solution is provided by the NextGEN Gallery plugin (compatible with WordPress 2.7).

The NextGEN Gallery is a WordPress plugin designated mainly for the setup and publishing of image galleries in an easy manner. It has many features as compared with similar plugins: customizable templates for galleries displaying, AJAX based thumbnails generation, server side watermarking functionality, TinyMCE integration, multilanguage support and more.

Among its functions, NextGEN Gallery allows you to define a Flash slideshow automatically, just by uploading the necessary pictures from a web browser based tabbed interface. The resulted Flash slideshow can be displayed in posts or pages with the next tag [Gallery not found], where the id corresponds to the index of the image gallery which will be shown as slideshow, respectively w and h, defines width and height of the slideshow.

In order to enhance the way in which your pictures are displayed on the blog pages, the NextGEN-FlashViewer plugin could be installed.

But if you want to add a slideshow in header or another location of the template (in sidebar a NextGEN Gallery widget can be enabled from the dashboard), a custom code is also available:

if (function_exists(”nggSlideshowWidget”))
{ nggSlideshowWidget(id,width,height); }
?>

In the code shown earlier, you must specify the id of the gallery , as well as the width and height of the Flash object. From the tests made, the preliminary results indicates the fact that the slideshows published using this short PHP code, does not have the slow zooming effect which is present in the ones published in posts (practically the widget does not integrate this effect). The settings related to the slideshows appearance can be adjusted from the Gallery Options accessible from the Dashboard.

Related Articles

• Web Browsing In A Cinematic Fashion: Cooliris (0)
• The Future of Web Browsing Shown By Concept Series From Mozilla Labs (0)
• ScribeFire Blog Editor: How To Publish Articles Directly From Firefox Browser (0)
• How To Install WordPress On A Windows Localhost (0)
• Easy Publishing of WordPress Blogs RSS Feeds With FeedBurner (0)
• “Portable” Computers With PortableApps.com (0)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 9:47 am and is filed under Content Management Systems, Tutorials, WordPress News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.