Creating Slide Show

[jannmirch]

I have a client who would like to have a slide show on the home page.

The trick is she would like it set up so that new images can be dropped into a directory on the server and automatically be included in the slide show. Likewise, she would like old images to be able to be excluded from the slide show by simply removing them.

I was working with a programmer who told me it would be "no problem" to set up, but when he realized that I didn't want to have to manual edit the javascript every time I added/removed a picture, he disappeared.

I have almost no programming experience, though I have tinkered a bit with javascript. It seems like it should be doable with some sort of CMS. But I'm at a loss.

Can anyone advise me on a) whether this is possible and b) if so, the best way to proceed?

Thanks in advance!

[wige]

It is possible. Most likely you would do the scripting with Javascript to control changing the images. The tricky part comes in from scanning the folder where you store the images. This would be done either with PHP or Perl, whichever you use on your server. Basically, the PHP code would give the javascript the names of all the images in the folder so the javascript can cycle through.

Here is the PHP code to read the names of all the files in a directory.

<?PHP 
// Define the full path to your folder from root   
$path = "/www/folder/path/img/";   
// Open the folder   
$dir_handle = @opendir($path) or die("Cannot open the file $path");   
// Loop through the files   
while ($file = readdir($dir_handle)) {   
   $filepath = 'your.url/path/'.$file;
   echo $filepath;
}
// Close   
closedir($dir_handle);                       
?>

[DaveSawers]

And then you need to use PHP to write the file list into the Javascript code that actually cycles through those images for display purposes.

And you need to consider what to do if the user has Javascript turned off.

[cPages]

Hello,

We suggest using a flash slide show. Once the slide show template is made it would be simply a matter of uploading your re-sized image to the server and editing an xml file on the server to change the images and descriptions.

Let us know if you need any help,

Regards