The vagaries of the beloved WordPress, and forcing what is really a word/text based publishing platform to do stuff for photographs and photography is always a bit of a test, to be honest. This morning’s self-imposed task was a) to upgrade to version 2.8.6; b) to upgrade 4 Plugins (all manually); and c) to teach myself to create embedded slide shows, integrating with Lightroom.
This embedding lark is really for the portfolio site at brendaburrell.co.uk, after watching my German hosts struggling to see the portfolio site’s slideshows through the clickable link in the leading photos. But of course it’s all going to be useful here too.
After some heavy Googling, I found the Kimili Flash Embed Plugin and pretty much followed the guidelines set out here by Marco Ryan. It seems you need to upload two copies of your Lightroom slideshow from the web module, one with the index file, and another with it removed. You do this via an ftp client of course, although in this case, the original ‘/Cornwall’ gallery was already online. So one’s called one ‘/Cornwall’ and the other ‘/Cornwallembed’. There may be a more sophisticated way of doing this, but at the moment I’m not sure what the Dickens that might be.
The path to the one without the index file goes in the html of the page, right here. Took me several tries to realise that we don’t have a /loader in our (UK?) version: it’s called /viewer, but with that blinding realisation, the path is therefore ‘/Cornwallembed/viewer.swf’. Bingo!
Of course the size and shape of the slideshow, and the sheer quantity of photos in this Cornwall slideshow isn’t right for this particular template, but yes, I’m rather happy with it. And thought my lovely readers might like a glimpse of those warm summer days back in 2008.
So that’s a) and b) completed manually. The next thing is to try and work out how to get WordPress and its Plugins to do that much-loved two-click upgrade. Have removed a strangely named file index.php.wpau.bak (?) from outside WordPress that may have had something to do with recent failures, but also, may not. Any suggestions there would be very gratefully received, as always.
Task c) is almost there. Some tweaking yet, but what do you think?
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6 Comments
Slidepress is pretty good for being easy – it needs Slide Show Pro’s standalone SWF file to work. With that, you can create a new Wordpress post, use the standard image uploader within the post, then press a button to insert a slideshow containing the images you have uploaded to the post – you can pre-prepare slideshow templates to pick from as well – so you just create all of your settings just once and re-use.
I’ve got Slideshow Pro for Lightroom, and tbh it’s lovely but extremely complicated. And it reverts to default settings every time. However I don’t see why the url for a .swf file made with Slide Show Pro shouldn’t work just as well as a Simpleviewer one, do you?
The instructions given by Marco Ryan are about twice as complex as they need to be. Experimenting with a few slideshows I’ve already uploaded, you don’t need two versions, and it doesn’t matter whether the index file is there or not. Or it certainly doesn’t need taking out.
SlidePress looks to do a possibly more sophisticated version of the same thing as this Kimili plugin. Definitely worth a try. Especially if it can be done without purchasing yet another version of Slideshow Pro.
Have you got it working over at NotSoWildLife.com?
Yeah, the front page slideshow is Slide Show Pro with settings determined from the Wordpress admin panel using SlidePress. I have one default set of settings with just cross fading and no navigation or titles or anything else. It makes sense to re-use these settings templates for consistency.
Mine is a little bit more complicated because I ended up having a timed job on the host that writes an xml file based on post category – and the slideshow on the front always looks for that – so the pictures change every day on their own. It was interesting getting that working. It does mean that you don’t see the same slideshow every day as well – if it was left to me to change it manually I’m sure it’d become a chore and wouldn’t happen very often. The upshot of all this is that I can create a new post, use the upload button on the post screen to add my images and post it, and it will be picked up for the slideshow when it’s category matches later.
Of course, just creating a new post, uploading some images then pressing a button to insert the slideshow is as difficult as it should be for most people.
Looks really fantastic: http://notsowildlife.com/. Hadn’t realised you’d made that change.
Are you talking about a timed cronjob? And your last sentence there is exactly where I am: increasingly things are getting more and more difficult as we try to do more sophisticated things just to keep up with the way everything we like is looking. So important, though.
Yeah, a timed cronjob – but that is peculiar to how I’ve set things up, and not something you’d need to do really.
Oh well done, it was well worth it.
I’m sticking to the basics, and refining the shape and size of the slideshows I already have on the portfolio site to make them look right in the template. That’s as tricky as I can be bothered with. Like you, I know if things get too cumbersome, I just don’t do ‘em.
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