Jan
2008
– WP PicLens Plus —
Overview
WordPress plugin creates Media RSS image feeds compatible with Cooliris PicLens. Enables browsing of blog images using the PicLens advanced 3d Wall and fullscreen slideshow. Supports WordPress gallery plugins such as NexGEN Gallery. Works in both PHP4 and PHP5.1
Current Version
1.0.5.10 — released 2008/04/11
Background
Cooliris PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen slideshow experience. Effortlessly drag, click, and zoom your way around a 3d wall of pictures for an extraordinary, full-screen viewing experience.
PicLens is a free plugin that runs in your browser. Several major browsers are supported, including Firefox. PicLens works out-of-the-box with major websites such as flickr. In fact, any website can publish its images to PicLens by creating a Media RSS feed.
Cooliris has also created a WordPress plugin (wp-piclens) that creates Media RSS feeds for your blog, allowing readers to browse your images using PicLens. The wp-piclens plugin includes a slideshow sidebar widget to display thumbnails of your blog images along with an optional flickr feed.
wp-piclens brings incredible visual power to your blog via PicLens. It does, however, have a couple of limitations (noted in wp-piclens 1.0.5):
- only post images are included in its media rss feed. pages are not.
- only hard-coded images are included. For example, images that are inserted dynamically by a gallery plugin would not be included.
- requires PHP5
WP PicLens Plus
wp-piclens-plus is a modified version of Cooliris’s official wp-piclens plugin that removes some of the limitations mentioned previously.
When activated, wp-piclens-plus creates a Media RSS feed for each post and page, including tag and category pages. A page/post is scanned for images after all plugins have had a chance to run, so images from gallery plugins such as NexGEN Gallery are also included.
wp-piclens-plus Media RSS feeds are accessible using the page url plus “/feed/mrss/”. So, the Media RSS feed for the page “http://blog/page/” would be found at “http://blog/page/feed/mrss/”. If pretty permalinks are turned off, the page and feed would be something like: “http://blog/?p=17″ and “http://blog/?p=17&feed=mrss”.
The Media RSS feed url is also published as a meta tag for auto-discovery by PicLens.
Otherwise, wp-piclens-plus functions identically to wp-piclens. In particular, the sidebar slideshow widget works exactly as before. It only shows images that are in posts.
** Download wp-piclens-plus **
Requirements
- WordPress 2.3 (tested to 2.6.1)
- PHP 5.1 PHP4 or PHP 5.1
- PHP xml libraries must be installed (see known issues).
- (optional) if you are using NexGEN Gallery:
- In Gallery>Options>Gallery, turn OFF “Activate JQuery Navigation”.
- wp-piclens-plus doesn’t work well with ngg’s permalinks feature. Recommend that you turn it off in Gallery>Options>General Options.
Usage
Install and activate the plugin. (If using NextGEN Gallery, see requirements above). Then, browse a page or post with a PicLens-enabled browser. If the page has an image in it and everything is working, then you should see the PicLens “play” button on the image when you mouseover it. Click the play button to open the PicLens 3d Wall.
The wp-piclens-plus options menu works exactly the same as with wp-piclens.
Demo
- Eno River Photo Gallery - this is a NextGEN Gallery with wp-piclens-plus enabled. You should see the PicLens “play” button when you mouseover the images. If not, make sure that you have PicLens installed in your browser and check the known issues below.
Known Issues
- If wp-piclens-plus throws a fatal error when you activate it, it is probably because PHP doesn’t have all of the xml libraries installed. PHP4 requires the domxml php extension. PHP5 requires the dom php extension.
- In Firefox, PicLens has a toolbar button. This doesn’t work for blogs. Use the image button instead.
- During the development of wp-piclens-plus, I discovered a problem with the CompleteRSS WordPress plugin. Please deactivate it if you are using it. Leave a comment below, if you need instructions for how to fix it to work with wp-piclens-plus.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Ronald Heft, Jr. since I copied the feed initialization code from his Podcasting WordPress plugin.
Super big thanks to The Cooliris Team. PicLens rocks!
Disclaimer
PicLens and Cooliris are trademarks of Cooliris, Inc. liferain.com and wp-piclens-plus are not affiliated in any way with Cooliris, Inc.
