Alternative RSS Method (Zenfolio, Flickr, etc.,)

dikiem — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:40:46 +0000

I had mentioned in the Wordpress Plugin section, there is an Zenfolio RSS plug that is used to display nice little thumb nails on the side bar of your Zenfolio Galleries. In search of finding something more specific, I came across an alternative method. While it is no plug in yet, but a simple PHP / HTML knowledge could get you going with this. You can see a sample of it operating in my Flower Photographs section here (http://knguyentu.com/wordpress/photography-by-kevin/flowers-photographs/)

The RSS engine I used there is RSS Parser for PHP5+ (http://rssphp.net/).

Download this RSS file and place it in the same folder as the theme files you are using. In my case, I’ve placed inside ./wordpress/wp-content/themes/(theme name)/… In another words, in the same location the theme index.php file is located.

Once you’ve place the RSS file there, you will need to setup a page to use as a template for your rss. You can easily make a copy of the page.php provided by your theme. Let’s copy it and call it photographs.php.

Now for the fun part. Edit the photographs.php and place the code in here, somewhere towards the bottom before the sidebar and/or footer calls.

$values = get_post_custom_values("photoRSS"); // echo $values[0]; require_once 'rss_php.php'; $rss = new rss_php; $rss->load($values[0]); $items = $rss->getItems();


$html = '';

foreach($items as $index => $item) {

$html .= '
'.$item['title'].'
';

$html .= '
'.$item['description'].'
';

$html .= "
;

}

echo $html;

?>

This will loop through the RSS code and strip out the the RSS feed file and present it as your see int he example. You could wrap some HTML in the “$html” section in the code above to make the box look fancy and colorful if you like.

To be a bit more creative, with how the code is now, it will RSS pull all items in the RSS feed. You could add a simple loop around the code and limit how many items to pull per feed. See the code snip below. In BOLD is what was added to accommodate that.

$values = get_post_custom_values("photoRSS"); // echo $values[0]; require_once 'rss_php.php'; $rss = new rss_php; $item_limit = 3; $rss->load($values[0]); $items = $rss->getItems();


$i = 0;

$html = '';

foreach($items as $index => $item) {

   if ($i < $item_limit) {

      $html .= '
'.$item['title'].'
';

      $html .= '
'.$item['description'].'
';

      $html .= "
;

      $i++;

   }

}

echo $html;

?>

Now all you need is to create a new page, using the photographs.php template.

In the Custom Fields, use custom field “photoRSS” tag and place the URL to your RSS feed and away you go!

Let me know what you think and what alternative you are using?

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WP-Plugins: Zenfolio RSS

dikiem — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:02:07 +0000

In setting up the Photography By Kevin section, I wanted to display random pictures from my photography gallery I had hosted over @ zenfolio. Why Zenfolio? After the previous design of a photogallery website and using a flash photo album, I got tired of maintaining it through PHP. Zenfolio seems to fit the need with standard template layout and easy maintenance.

Instead of spending time writing a PHP plugin, the first came to mind was to try to look for a plugin someone had done. Why reinvent the wheel when someone already did that?

Vibol Hou had used a flickr RSS plugin and modified for zenfolio need. While is perfect what I was looking.

Plugin Homepage: (HERE)
Download Version 0.5:

You can see an example of it being used in the Photography By Kevin page (tab above).

To use, you can simply download the plugin and place that in the plugins directory. In the Plugin control, you set how many image(s) you will be pulling per tag call. Afterward, a simple tag added to your post, page, or template will pull the photo from the gallery in.

Using the tag

Will take care of it.

If you want to spice it up a bit, what you could do is set in the plugin setting to only pull one image. With that, you can call the tag “x” number of times. Each time it will call on random image. This will give you the flexibility to wrap a table loop around it or add spacer between each image.

Pretty neat stuff. Try it out and let’s hear how you use it!