Editing RSS file for slideshow
March 22, 2009 - 4:58pm
A tool
Have you thought about grabbing a tool that just does it for you since you've stated you don't have much time to do this yourself?
Personally, I use drupal for these exact type of things. But, there are a lot of other tools out there. Something like this could be easily and quickly built with a framework or other tool. Is there a personal preference on the type of thing you use..... such as language?
March 22, 2009 - 4:59pm
Views Carousel
The method and tools I use is, roughly, outlined at http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode20.
March 22, 2009 - 8:27pm
Using Drupal 5
I am currently on Drupal 5 (that is what our site was recently designed on) and I have not started evaluating the move to Drupal 6. Does the Carousel module work well on Drupal 5? It looks like it has a rather limited users. I personally like all of the flexibility of the AJAX slideshow I have, just wish there was a simpler tool to manage it, but if this is a good solution for Drupal 5 it would probably be worth the effort to switch.
March 24, 2009 - 6:25am
May 17, 2009 - 5:24pm
Any progress?
So Jeggen, what did you finally decide on? I'm using Drupal 6 and thought about creating an RSS view of the news feed to do this, but I'm fairly new with Drupal and wasn't sure how to add an image link and the article link. I'm still looking at it though.
May 24, 2009 - 12:50pm
AJAX Slideshow
I am using the AJAX Slideshow API from Google. I love the way it looks, the great compatability across browsers, and have no issues with images being cached and displaying incorrectly. I use an RSS file that I manually edit to control what images are displayed and what they link to. Someday I will put together a PHP/MySQL package to mange this, but just editing the RSS file works for now. If you want to see what it looks like you can see it on the homepage of our site at www.sheridanlutheran.org
September 18, 2009 - 11:23pm
September 23, 2009 - 4:29pm
AJAX Slideshow
Indra,
there are three components to getting this running...
1) Code in page template. You can find full documentation of the API here: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/ This is the code that I have used though to generate the slideshow on our website. Note the "var feed" option which sets the URL of your RSS feed.
<!--Start of Script for Google AJAX Slideshow-->
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/gfslideshow.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<style type="text/css">
.gss a img {border : none;}
.gss {
width: 626px;
height: 460px;
color: #dddddd;
background-color: #ffffff;
padding: 0px;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
function load() {
var feed = "http://www.sheridanlutheran.org/files/swf/slideshow.rss";
var options = {
displayTime: 5000,
transistionTime: 500,
linkTarget : google.feeds.LINK_TARGET_SELF,
fullControlPanel : true,
fullControlPanelSmallIcons : true,
pauseOnHover : false,
scaleImages : true,
maintainAspectRatio : false
};
var ss = new GFslideShow(feed, "slideShow", options);
}
google.load("feeds", "1");
google.setOnLoadCallback(load);
</script>
<!--End of Script for Google AJAX Slideshow-->
2) Setup RSS File. You can download ours to see the syntax I used for the slideshow. I manually edit our since it changes infrequently but I think someone could easily setup a PHP/MySQL script to use a database backed method to upload images, set URLs, set order, and phase in/out of the cycled based on dates, etc.
http://www.sheridanlutheran.org/files/swf/slidesho...
3) Insert code in page...
<div class="content"><div id="slideShow" class="gss">Loading Slideshow...</div>
That's all! As long as your RSS file and images are in the right place you should be golden.
I have created a slideshow for our church website using Google's AJAX API. So far I love it, it works without any flash, is easy to update, and doesn't present any caching issues.
I have it setup to read an RSS file on our server, that gives it a list of images and links associated with the images. The slideshow then links each slide to a link on our website, so that if a user clicks the slide they will go to a specific page.
I am looking for a way, other than HTML-Kit, to update this RSS file. One thing I thought about was creating a PHP/MySQL system that would allow other select users to upload an image, select its click-through link, select which 4 images to include in the slideshow, and order those images. Then the RSS file would be dynamically generated by the PHP script based of the database and attributes. The problem is I don't have a ton of time to create this setup. So I have an AJAX file manager that works great for uploading/renaming/deleting images. Now I would like a web-based tool that a user could login to to modify the RSS file to change the image selection and order manually so that it can be done by other users. Any suggestions on such a tool?
John
Pastor for Mission & Outreach & De Facto Tech Guy
Sheridan Lutheran Church | www.sheridanlutheran.org