Flickr Plugin For Mango Blog
I think that just about everybody has a flickr account, and many of us want to put our photos on our blogs. Be it family photos or screen shots of video games and websites — they add visual interest to our web site designs and engage our readers. I know, Mango Blog already has a flickrWidget, but I didn't really like the slideshow and wanted to see a group of thumbnails instead. So I built my own plugin. Now you Mango Blog owners have an option for putting your flickr Pics onto your site.
Features
The flickrPics plugin has some great features not available in all plugins yet. This plugin is pod-enabled so you can set it's position within your sidebar in the admin. This is also the first plugin that supports Caching. Thanks to Adam Tuttle for writing the cache script that he will publish later this week on his site Fusion Grokker. Caching the feeds from these plugins will increase performance of your blog and will be less likely to return an error if those site go offline for any length of time.
This Cache feature is something I will also be adding to the twitter plugin later this week.
Configuration Settings
I tried to pack several useful features into flickrPics to give you flexibility to make it work in as many themes as possible. When you configure the flickrPics plugin you have a few options available.
Tags: allow you to perform a search through your photos for particular tags. This is a comma separated list and works the same as it would like the flicker search.
Photos to Display: A numerical value for the number of images you want to show at a time.
Photo Size: Square thumbnails, and medium thumbnails are the only two options at the moment. I am looking into other options for future updates.
Custom Header: Allows you to specify a custom H2 title.
Image Wrappers: There are two extra fields "before image" and "after image" that allow you to wrap your images in custom elements like <p> tags or a <br> tag.
Download the plugin
The flickrPics plugin is free to download so get it now, and please provide me your feedback for it's usefulness, and suggestions for improvements.
Hi Mark,
I'm attempting to set this up on one of my other blogs, and even though the plugin is activated and configured, nothing is showing up in my sidebar. I know the theme I'm using is *not* pod enabled, but that didn't seem to stop your twitter plugin from working. Any suggestions?
Ok, I switched to a pod-enabled theme and it's working now. I'd like to see my custom header replace the built-in header text "Flickr Pics" instead of being added below it, and also the ability to have no header at all. (Even though I probably wouldn't want it with no header, I could see someone wanting that.)
Adam, on of the short comings to mango blogs sidebar system is that it runs in a loop so if your sidebar template specifies a header in that loop then all pods will have a header. It would seam to me that all pods would have to be configurable within the admin for custom or default headers, even the built in pods or third party plugins. At best your only option is manually change the sidebar.cfm for the theme. You can remove "<h2><mangox:PodProperty title /></h2>" from the pod output loop. and instead add your own custom headings to all the individual TemplatePod's. I tried to explain this to Laura but I don't think I understand enough about the system to communicate this, or there is a better way and I just don't understand it yet. Thanks for the feedback Adam, I hope I can use this feedback to create a better plugin down the road.
After speaking with Laura about the sidebar headers, she informed me that the header could be changed by tweaking my plugin a bit. I have updated the code to reflect these additions. So you can now change the header to anything you want.
Don't hesitate to contact us for true Mango Blog Hosting at http://www.mangobloghosting.com