Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

Following my successful upgrade to WordPress 2.3 the other day I started looking for useful plugins that would allow me to have either a full-blown gallery or an RSS feed from my Flickr/Photobucket/picassa galleries. I found that many of them utilised the new widget functionality but unfortunately my theme does not yet support widgets (I am working on this). I then came across LightBox, a nice plugin that allows links to any photo on the web to be displayed in a nice little javascript box that also allows you to flip forward and back thorugh a photo set that YOU define. So essentially if I had a couple of photos of a car in my photobucket and another couple in my flickr account I could get lightbox to treat them all as one set. Cool huh.

I played around with it a little and managed to get a text based link to deliver it’s source image through lightbox. This proved that everything worked and my WP install did indeed support it. I then replaced the text link with an image and this worked fine as well. I then set about creating a set of images (My Santa Pod pictures from last year) and pulling them from my flickr account. I’ll show an example of a few here – For the rest visit my Galleries page.

Click on any thumbnail to open the lightbox.

Pretty nifty eh? I thought so. It also means I don’t have to organise all my flickr photos into sets which means I can carry on using the free account! I love free! I’ll be uploading a few more galleries over the next few days and will also be working on a way to get them to appear on separate pages with a context based menu in the sidebar so I don’t have 300,000,000 images all on one page. I can’t see it being a problem in all honesty. Make a page with the parent being “galleries” and then create the sidebar links to them. Easy.

Anyway. Have a look and let me know what you all think. I do know there is one bug so far and that is that it seems to take a while before the lightbox scripts to become active so if you click on a thumbnail before the page has fully loaded it just links you directly to the image and doesn’t use the lightbox. If this happens to you just go back and wait for the page to fully load. Hopefully separating the pages should alleviate this problem somewhat.

Cheers