The Flickr Slideshow plug-in for Joomla 1.5 is a free open source plug-in to display photo's from your Flickr account on your Joomla 1.5 website. It uses the phpFlickr library, Slimbox (a lightweight visual lightbox clone) and the TripTracker slideshow scripts to aquire and display the photo's. Single photo's and complete sets can be displayed by use of a simple expression. In contrast to other Joomla Flickr plugins, this plugin doesn't require editing the website template.

Installing the plugin

Installing the plugin only requires basic Joomla knowledge:

• install the plugin: menu Extensions --> install/uninstall --> upload the zip file)
• Go to the plugin configuration page: menu Extensions --> plugin manager --> select "Universal Playground - Flickr Slideshows"
• enter your Flickr API key (which you can get here) in the corresponding field in the plugin parameter form.
• enable the plugin
• save the settings and go for your life!

Displaying Photo's from your flickr account

Displaying a photo on your website with this plugin is relatively simple. All you need is the ID number of the photo or set you want to be displayed. The photo or set ID can be obtained from the URL of the photo resp. set. For instance in:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/exposej/1296812671/

1296812671 is the ID number of the photo and in:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/exposej/sets/72157600375172301/

72157600375172301 is the ID number of the set.

Now we're all set to start using the plugin. Photo's can be displayed in an article on your website by entering a simple expression like [flickr photo=xxx] (where xxx is replaced by the photo ID number). for example [flickr photo=247394942] will result in:

The plugin will replace the expression by the photo automatically upon accessing the article on the website. The expression will not be replaced by the photo in the adminstration interface.

Attributes

Next to the id of the photo, the plugin allows several attributes to be added to the expression in order to control size, alignment and spacing of the photo and select the slideshow.

Note that upon clicking the photo, a slide show interface is activated. This plug-in currently contains the Slimbox (a visual clone of Lightbox) and TripTracker slide shows:

As you can see, both slideshows can be used in the same article. By adding the attribute slideshow=xxx (where xxx is replaced by the name of slide show), you can override the default selection and force the plug-in to use that particular slideshow. The default slide show can be set by the plug-in parameters in the plug-in manager.

size

The plugin allows 4 photo sizes, supported by Flickr, to be selected:

• square
• thumbnail
• small (default)
• medium

For example, the expression [flickr photo=247394942 size=medium] will be replaced by:

Next to the 4 photo sizes that cam be selected by this attribute, Flickr also stores a large version of a photo. In most cases this photo size will be too large to display in an article. This version is however used by the TripTracker slide show to display a photo.

An expression in HTML has several more attributes next to setting size parameters. This plugin supports the Alignment and spacing (ALIGN, HSPACE, VSPACE) in compliance with the HTML standard. The photo on the right is a result of the following expression:

[flickr photo=247394942 size=small align=right vspace=10 hspace=10]

Displaying Sets

Like with single photo, sets can be displayed by entering a simple expression. For instance, [flickr set=72157603518791056] results in:

In contrast to photo's, sets can only be displayed using the square sized thumbnail. However, the slide show can still be selected by the corresponding attribute.