Extension talk:SimpleViewer.php

This extension is designed to integrate the SimpleViewer flash gallery into MediaWiki. SimpleViewer is available for use free of charge for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Example

• http://mintmedia.co.nz/research/index.php/Mint_Media:Sandbox

Features

• A nice flash gallery to display images in your wiki
• Uses MediaWiki's image resizing functions so no extra work is required to resize images - that they are uploaded to the wiki is enough
• Integrates with other wiki extentions such as Dynamic Page List to provide dynamic galleries based on category, namespace, image name, user or any other query provided by DPL.
• Uses a standard script to detect the flash browser plugin
• Fetches the content of the image article and provides this text as a caption when the image is displayed in the gallery. This text may contain links and all the normal HTML markup supported by flash.

Installation

Note: MW:Extension:SyntaxHighlight GeSHi contains nice concepts for installation in conjunction with third party software

• Create a folder called SimpleViewer inside your wiki extensions folder
• Download the SimpleViewer.php script
• Save the script into the SimpleViewer folder as SimpleViewer.php
• Download the SimpleViewer flash application from Airtight Interactive
• Unpack the zip and save the resulting simpleviewer folder inside exensions/SimpleViewer
• Make sure all the files are readable by the web server. On most hosting platforms this means giving them a Unix mode of 755 - making them readable by everybody.
• Add this line to LocalSettings.php

require('$IP/extensions/SimpleViewer/SimpleViewer.php');

• Check that the extension in installed by looking at Special:Version on your wiki. SimpleViewer should appear under Parser hooks
• Create a test page containing the text:

{{simpleviewer:src=Gallery test}}

• Create an article called Gallery test with the content

*Image:Foo.jpg
*Image:Bar.jpg
*Image:Pic.jpg

Where the image names are replaced with the names of images you have uploaded to your wiki.

• Go to the test page. You should see the gallery appear.

Examples

The gallery generation becomes much more powerful if you integrate it with DPL queries. Using DPL you can make:

• Galleries of a user's images
• A better Special:NewImages page
• A gallery based on names matching a particluar pattern

Bugs

• Parameters other than src in the parser function don't work

Fixed bugs

• Does not parse wikitext of gallery src article so DPL queries and templates will not work as expected
• For some reason the head script containing swfobject.js only seems to load when action=purge other wise the non-flash message is displayed.

Further work

• Allow in-line specification of images so that a separate article is not required. Also support DPL to do this.
• Image thumbnail requests are sent a redirect header so it takes two HTTP requests instead of one to fetch each thumb and image (inefficient)
• Provide full control and pass all available parameters to SimpleViewer via parser params
• Thumb and image sizes are currently hard-wired. Provide a heiristic to send appropriate parameters to thumb.php based on the regular SimpleViewer parameters