Topic awaiting preservation: Hold My Hand and Take a Step Back (Page 1 of 1)

Okay, I want to apologize for not continuing with this project lately. I havent even had time to clean my kitchen in weeks, let alone do anything fun.

However, since that particular functionality isn't urgent, I was hoping we could take a step back and try something a little simpler first.

I want to create a slideshow in rememberance of my car, which I recently sold. For each slide, I currently plan to have the following information:

Image
Slide title (Possibly)
Text
Back/Next buttons
A drop-down menu listing all the slide titles (Possibly -- I'll discuss that and see what you guys think is the best navigation option for the type of content I'm offering.)

As a guess, there will probably be something like 20 slides.

Would it behoove me to go with PHP/MySQL for this, or should I just use JavaScript? (If PHP/MySQL, I won't need a Web interface for entering info; I'll just import it into a database or enter it manually, since it shouldn't change.)

If it's 6 of one, half dozen of the other, then we'll go with PHP/MySQL and make it a learning experience.

Thanks!

I would definately recommend using PHP for this. If it is going to stay at just the 20 (or whatever) images, you don't really need the database - you can hold all the info in an associative array.

The drop-down menu would be just fine IMO, and easy to populate from the info in the array as well. Some people have a problem with using DDM's as nav though...

This is very similar to what I did with one of my galleries. I think I may have posted the code for that before, if you're interested in seeing it for reference I'll post it again.

Like DL, I also did something similar with my image galleries (example). The code is probably not the most efficient, since I did this when I was first learning PHP (it was my first project, actually), and I will most likely rework it this summer, but it still works nicely. PHP is definitely the way to go.

I would agree that you don't need to use a database--my galleries, for example, use flat files. Although I personally wouldn't use DDMs for navigation, I don't see a problem with it.




www.liminality.org

What I did, once again with one of my old galleries, was this: I had a directory called gallery. Within that directory I had my .jpg, and a .txt by the same name. My PHP script (gallery/index.php) would step through the gallery directory, and everytime it found a <name>.jpg, it would display that, then the info in <name>.txt, then a few line breaks. You can easily do this by, as said, using an array with all the <name>.jpg's that the script finds. When the user clicks on a button, it'll go to, say, slideshow.php?page=2, the 2 would reference the array element for the next image, then php would take $array[<number>] . ".jpg", display the image, then suck the info out of $array[<number>] . ".txt"

Not very complicated at all. And the only thing you have to do to add a new slide is to upload the .jpg and the corresponding .txt file.

Granted, there IS a downside to this method. Your .jpg's will automatically display in ascending order from the date they were uploaded/modified. Easy to get around at first, but when the slideshow grows, if you want to stick a new image in the middle, you'd have to remove all the files you want -after- it from the server, upload the new one, then upload the other ones in order.

Have fun :P

I've built a little JavaScript picture gallery only recently where I used a combination of forward/back links and DDMs for the navigation - see here:

http://kussatz.com/nice-n-easy/fotogalerie.html

The main reason I chose JavaScript there is that the host just doesn't allow PHP, but it also has the advantage that there is no need to reload the whole page for each picture which makes loading times shorter, and it does its job just fine for what I needed. Adding the text you want for each of the pictures doesn't require much more work either.

Of course, it's also possible to the same thing in PHP or even let PHP dynamically output the JS and DDMs to get the best of both worlds and make adding new pictures easier, but if you're not going to have several galleries with hundrets of photos then JS might be the easiest/fastest solution.