vbGallery slideshow on CMS

[DDIG]

I would LOVE to be able to create a slideshow of large images from certain categories at a vBulletin CMS page.

Is this possible using som nifty PHP code? Can any programmer that works on vbGallery be of help here? It would be so very nice.

[Luciano]

Well i had one nearly ready.. a little php and the rest javascript.. preloading next image, using soft transitions etc...
only there is one little problem.
the image sizes..
If you do it with thumbnails.. no problem.. as you can place it where you want.. left or right column, center block etc...

but as you say lots of people would want big images.. now in my example i had normal images resized to 400 px and originals to 1024.. it worked fine with the normal ones .. but hardly anybody has max width and max height set to 400px .

Anything bigger would cause huge server load. (large images around 300k => 1.5 MB just for 1 user looking at 5 images) if you have 1000 visits (thats not much a day) that would meen 1.5 GB traffic per day!!!! just for the slideshow
so the problem is.. how to get users to have small intermediate images that would fit in slideshow.

I'll look into the code once gold is out.

L.

[DDIG]

You are right. Caching is an option I'd say. Your regular visitors take some bandwith once, but subsequent visits would not eat bandwith. How this kind of caching can be achieved I don't know exactly. I also run these sites, Nature Inspirations has *lots* and lots of visits yet bandwith is around 8Gig a month:


Nature-Inspirations
Architecture Inspirations

etc.

These all work fine. I run mainly photography related sites and would love, really love to see any kind of ability to show large size images on my site, really. A slideshow of say 20 photo's, not preloading, but loading on demand as they are requested would be so nice...

[cory_booth]

Luciano...
I made a little plugin which generated alot of feedback...
Just not as good of a "programmer" as I wish I was...

Feel free to incorporate if you find it usefull...
[WIDGET] Slider - vBulletin.org Forum

[Luciano]

Originally Posted by cory_booth

Luciano...
I made a little plugin which generated alot of feedback...
Just not as good of a "programmer" as I wish I was...

Feel free to incorporate if you find it usefull...
[WIDGET] Slider - vBulletin.org Forum

Very nice! It seems to work nice and smooth.
If I may do 2 remarks.

But First a suggestion. You are using jquery.. thats a very good framework. The only thing is.. vbulletin uses a different framework.. yahoo..
Now i am sure it would be possible to rewrite it, using yahoo framework instead. (why? because the pages would load yahoo framework AND jquery)
(I know thats a bummer.. I myself feel much more comfortable with jquery than with yahoo)

first remark.
the only problem i see is: where do you want to place it!
I meen the width problem.
Usually in CMS users have 2 or 3 colums.
left and right colums are usually to small to position a relatively wide widget,
center column if you have dynamic width will not look good.. so the only place to position it would be left column with fixed width where the width would be the exact width of the widget (counting imagewidth plus the menu images).
Ideal would be to have some content you could place right of the slideshow.. that would adapt to the width of the column...

second remark (when adapted to vbgallery) I would see the problem, that user would have to adapt the intermediate image to the width/height of the widget. What happens if it pulls newest images and you have one portrait image followed by a landscape image (wider than high vs. higher than wide)

[hachito]

Chuck !! you can help whith this request ?

[Max Paint]

This would be a very nice feature!!!

[Luciano]

Well i have been looking into that and will be posting an alpha version next week..
its a forum home slideshow and not a cms one, but I think it could be integrated in cms some time later..
It has lots of limitations, as if you want to cache images there is no point in selecting random images, as the cache becomes obsolete if you never have the same images.
So main thing to select is a comma separated list of image-ids or sticky images (ordered by id) or oldest images (as they hardly ever change)
Also there are some settings to play around..like width, height, speed etc...

2 remarks..
to keep it lightweight, it is not done with jquery framework but with yahoo yui 2. as main parts of this are already loaded on forum home.

(it would be much better and more lightweight if we were using yui 3, but there are major conflicts if you load yui2 and yui3 on same page. so switching to yui3 can only be done when vbulletin does it.)

What it does. it regenerates the pictures in a slides folder in your file directory.
It looks a little bit like other known slideshows, but it has a complete different engine.

Here is demo, but urls and css are still all hardcoded so give me a week or so to pack it in plugins and templates.

demo : http://babelart.000space.com/forums/forum.php

(test site... beware some images can have more or less adult content)
and caching of images needs to be looked at a little more..

Luc

[DDIG]

It sure looks great. And it would be a very nice addon.

Currently I am using Slide Show Pro at my CMS pages: D-DIG.NL - Portal voor fotografie

I don't know if anyone knows that product, but the Director software is unheard of, totally blows you away. This is how things should be. Compared to that vBulletin and the likes look like prehistorical dinosaurs really... I don't mean to hurt anyone but this is simply great stuff.