Thread

G’day EE folks.

I’d like to have members upload images and captions with the option for pre-publish approval from an admin.  As a next step I’d like these images to play inside a Slideshow Pro (SSP) slideshow?

I assume I’d need to setup some kind of members only SAEF (possibly with a Solspace upload enhancement?).  Can that load into a specific gallery?  Can that be uploaded as “closed status” so an admin can then inspect and “approve”?

As it seems the 5pieces website (and tutes) are down . . . where can one go to understand how to automatically link images in an EE gallery to a SSP slideshow on the fly without manual intervention / hand edits?

Any help, guidance, or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

=)

Thomas

G’day EE folks.

I’d like to have members upload images and captions with the option for pre-publish approval from an admin.  As a next step I’d like these images to play inside a Slideshow Pro (SSP) slideshow?

I assume I’d need to setup some kind of members only SAEF (possibly with a Solspace upload enhancement?).  Can that load into a specific gallery?  Can that be uploaded as “closed status” so an admin can then inspect and “approve”?

As it seems the 5pieces website (and tutes) are down . . . where can one go to understand how to automatically link images in an EE gallery to a SSP slideshow on the fly without manual intervention / hand edits?

Any help, guidance, or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

=)

Thomas

I played around with something like this a little while ago.  We ended up not adding this functionality to our site (for non coding/functionality reasons), but that’s besides the point.  This is the setup I came up with:

1.  A SAEF on a member’s only page using a custom file upload module.  Solspace’s module might not have been out then or I didn’t know of it at least.  Anyway, it sounds like just would you would need for the upload bit.

2.  The SAEF submitted posts to a weblog.  We didn’t want to have moderation, so we the status to open right away.  But you could easily set this to “closed” and then go in to the CP yourselves and manually set it to “open”.  Should be no problem there.

3.  We wrote a template to spit out XML that we could feed to SSP.  This was good because we could manipulate the weblog:entries tag to do things like make individual slide shows based on who uploaded them or time-based by the most recent or category based, etc…  We did the customization through URL segments, so slideshow/member/bobsmith would show all of bobsmith’s uploades where slideshow/time/01012008 would show all of the entries on Jan 1 2008, for example. 

4.  Then, on the website template we just added the .swf with a custom flashvars to the url of the XML file.  Which file we linked to was controlled by URL segments.

It did take a little custom ActionScript work to get the flashVars to work, but if you’re familiar with ActionScript, it’s very easy to do. 

I’m not sure if the galleries module is even usable in this instance (i.e. accessible via SAEF) but I wouldn’t go that route, even if I could.  The weblog module is more flexible, obviously.  And it let us do things like have categories etc.. so we could create multiple galleries with SSP—something which I believe is a problem with the gallery module (at least from what I remember from a quick skim of the 5Pieces tutorial).

There are probably better ways of doing it, but I found this to be the simplest for me.  None of it is really hard, it just requires some well planned logic in the XML template.  If you’re just doing one slideshow, then it doesn’t even require that.  Anyway, hope you get some ideas from that.  If you have any questions, let me know.

Yo VB,

Thanks for your reply . . . I can mostly comprehend what you have laid out . . . but #3 & #4 will be a real challenge for me.

Thanks for pointing the way . . .

Yo VB,

Thanks for your reply . . . I can mostly comprehend what you have laid out . . . but #3 & #4 will be a real challenge for me.

Thanks for pointing the way . . .

It’s actually not so hard when you get started. 

If you need help with the ActionScript, let me know…I can help you do that.  That’s the only tricky part, though.  If you take a look at a typical SSP XML file, it’s not very complicated at all.  The weblog:entries tag handles all the info nicely.

As far as the logic behind it, just get out some paper and make a little flow chart.  Then test it with basic text.

{if segment_2 == "member"}
    Slideshow for member: {segment_3}
{if:else segment_2 == "category"}
    Slideshow for category: {segment_3}
{if:else}
...

That kind of thing.  Then a big task becomes pretty easy.

And once you have all that figured out, step 4 becomes pretty easy.  If you’re going to be using it a lot, I’d recommend using an embed and passing the URL as an embed variable.

Thanks again VB,

Really appreciate your guidance . . .

I’ll give it a burl one step at a time, and maybe ping on you if I get stuck?

Gotta love this EE community!

Cheers from Tasmania,

Thomas

Hey Thomas,

Sure…just let me know if you have any questions.  The SSP API Docs are fairly good too if you need help with that bit. Not EE Docs good, but than what is.

Thomas:

I took a different approach a while back, which was doing a member gallery using SSP, but making Flickr do all the work.

I wrote a pretty in-depth tutorial about how I did it on my blog.

See: Debra’s Dynamic Gallery on NobodyReadsThis.com for the article.

Wow . . . thanks for this tute!

Will have a look.

Peace from Tasmania,

Thomas