A few months ago I began trying different ways to integrate my photo collection into this blog.
- I used a Flickr Badge for a while, but it wasn’t really a part of the blog since the thumbnails were all linked back to photos in my Flickr account.
- I also tried using Singapore, a photo gallery application that I think is really great, but I couldn’t get it integrated into the WordPress templates.
- I’ve tried using RSS feeds by pasting some code from Feed to JavaScript into a custom page template, but I didn’t like the layout.
So…I abandoned the effort. I’ve also neglected my Flickr account because I’ve got too much else going on.
I was happy to discover a new WordPress plugin, FAlbum, that integrates my Flickr photos and my blog seamlessly. Yeah!
This plugin wasn’t the easiest to figure out how to use, though. And the developer’s site has a lot of questions from folks who were having trouble getting it going. The main problem folks seem to have is with friendly URL’s, which you don’t need. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get the Photos link to display in my sidebar where the “wp_list_pages( )” function is called – for cosmetic reasons mainly. For anyone who’s interested, I used a custom page template with a new blog page called Photos, and put a PHP header redirect into the template that sends the browser to the “unfriendly” plugin URL. I know that last sentence is complete nonsense to most people. Sorry, two years ago I couldn’t have said that.
Borderland and Flickr are finally talking to each other the way I wanted.
2 Comments
I’m jealous as I am one not able to get FAlbum to work. It’s been the wonkiest plugin I’ve ever tried. Maybe if I wring the neck of a chicken over my blog, some voodoo will occurr….
I had a very hard time getting it going until I visited the forum. I took advantage of the advice in the “Custom Theme Support” sticky. I also saw the kinds of trouble other folks were having with the friendly URL setting. I figured friendly URL’s didn’t matter since I don’t expect anyone to use permalinks for those picture pages anyhow. I used a custom page template so it would display as a link inside the list for my “pages” because I didn’t know any other way to get the link to look like it belonged in the sidebar as a regular part of the blog (a cosmetic thing). That template has nothing to it but the PHP header redirect:
header(Location: http://borderland.northernattitude.org/wp-content/plugins/falbum/falbum-wp.php); to point the browser back to the plugin’s file.
//with quotes inside parenthesis//
Those are the gory details. It took me several hours of fussing and several server errors to come up with that. I agree. It was wonky. But I like it.
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