Wordpress → Drop-in Slideshow

Strictly speaking, this is not a plug-in. Instead of being uploaded and then activated, it only needs to be uploaded (with Wordpress media uploader, no less). But doesn’t even need a Wordpress installation to work. Will pick up all big enough images from a folder at hand and play them in a full-frame random slide-show fashion.

This one started as just another one of Wordpress gallery plug-ins. The general idea was to spice up WP gallery with a semi-customizable slide-show to play a set of images. As if there are not gazzillion similar and mostly better plug-ins already. But when one is a tweaker, one tweaks. The same story as with this very blog, which evolved from a long line of more and more minimalistic web pages. Following the ultraminimalistic approach slide-show application itself came down to a blank page with only two buttons (and even those text-only) used to navigate back and forth through a list of images.

See drop_in_slideshow.php in action.

The very essence of presenting images in a slide-show fashion is for images to cover as much screen area as possible and demand as little user interaction as possible, thus making all shadowbox and light box effects unnecessary. After gladly abandoning light-box model, I still had to pass image-related data (file names, titles, captions, descriptions, …) to this slide-show app, making thing much more complicated than necessary, but then it occurred to me: returning image file name in form of a search parameter will cause Wordpress to happily auto-navigate to a post or page with that particular image, with no additional work on my part. Slick, isn’t it. And as a side effect, this took care of another problem: somewhere along the way there was a minor mishap of a misplaced bracket which caused a perfectly good Wordpress Slide-show plug-in to go berserk all of a sudden. So to get back into saddle, all I had to do was strip the code down to a bare minimum and put it’s plug-in variety on hold for a while. Besides, the code is always much much better when written from scratch for the second time. So if you expect to be needing a proper plug-in of a kind, just stay tuned.

Instalation, drop-in (standalone) mode

* extract the two files from drop-in-slideshow.zip into a folder with images
* point to http:// your_web_page /…/ your_pic_folder/drop_in_slideshow.php

Instalation, Wordpress mode

* upload the two files from drop-in-slideshow.zip with Wordpress media uploader
* point to http://your_web_page/…/uploads/drop_in_slideshow.php


Notes

* When using with Wordpress, auto-navigation does not work for images inserted via gallery shortcode.
* Since Drop-in Slideshow fits images to browser window, you don’t have to worry about user screen resolutions and can upload images a little bit bigger than expected user screen resolution. Still, keep an eye on image sizes as there’s only one thing worse than small images: the slow ones.
* Starting with Wordpress 2.7 media uploader creates one additional image size (large), which is exactly the one to insert into your posts. This will cause Drop-in Slideshow to play each image two times, making it a double random slide-show. Presented like this it almost sounds as a feature...

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