Slider Galleries

Thanks for the update on your “Landscape” topic and for this interesting new question. I’m glad you’re making progress.

Let me make sure I understand what you want. When you say “PDF’s viewed one-at-a-time”, do you mean the actual document or just the thumbnail image generated by Google Viewer? I’m guessing the latter because when you click through to a document it comes up in Adobe Reader, one document at a time.

So, I assume you want a gallery that looks like the sample on this web site:

jQuery Slider Shock

where there’s a strip of small thumbnails down the left side and a larger version of the “current” image in the center. Is that what you’re thinking of? If not, can you say more about what you’d like?

There are lots of “Slider Gallery” plugins and packages out there. I’m not sure which of them would support a gallery of PDF documents with thumbnail images generated by Google Viewer. Once I know more about what you want I can look around…

Hi David,

Your welcome. I hope the feedback is useful to either you and/or your audience, now or in the future.

As for your clarification question, correct it would be the latter as I was thinking of only the thumbnail image generated by Google Viewer being in the slider (my learning curve with some of the terminology is steep, but is going up!). The “slider” idea is to have the thumbnails be viewed one at a time with the functionality for the visitor/viewer to click on any thumbnail and subsequently view the PDF document in the browser. This option is the alternate to having an extended list of documents for the visitor to scroll through and/or select from in each gallery category.

Using MLA, multiple “categories” will be created each displayed in a separate gallery with several PDF’s attached to each gallery category.

Took a look at your sample and that is addressing the vision in my mind. Although from a first vistit, I don’t think that plugin will handle PDF’s.

Your summary is accurate. I have searched but and looked at several “Slider” plugins but have not seen one yet that will support PDF Documents with thumbnail images generated by Google Viewer.

I was thinking MLA might do this. The Gallery function is very good and handles the PDF’s as sought.

I have done some research and some thinking about this, but have not come up with a solution that satisfies both of your requirements. First, you want a slider gallery that shows the image generated by Google Viewer in two places; the “thumbnail” and the “full sized image”. Second. you want the “full sized image” to be a link to the actual PDF document from which the Google Viewer image was generated.

Although it might be possible to get a plugin such as JS Shadowbox to display the Google Viewer output as its full sized image, I do not know of any plugin or other WordPress add-on that generates a gallery in which the “full sized image” is actually a link to another destination.

The alternative is to construct a WordPress page or modify the “attachment.php” template that displays a single image (or set of images) with “next” and “previous” links that navigate thru the list. You could use the pagination parameters of [mla_gallery] as part of that solution, but I think it would require some PHP coding to complete the solution. There may also be some themes that support pagination of attachments.

I will keep this in mind for future versions, but I’m afraid that’s all the help I can give you at this point. If you find a solution that’s of general interest, please post it here. Good luck with this project.

Actually let me clarify and try to articulate further…

1) A slider gallery is not necessarily needed BUT based on what my project entails, I am thinking that it may add value to the visitor/viewer experience.

2) Currently using MLA, I now have the thumbnail image being displayed, when the thumbnail is “clicked on” the viewer sees the PDF document in the browser. This is acceptable and provides the basic illustration of my needs. I do not need Google Viewer to display it in both places.

3) The “second scenario” you summarize is not the objective.

4) What I would like to achieve is taking the basic illustration mentioned above in #2 to a more advanced stage and instead of displaying viewable PDF’s use MS Excel Interactive Templates.

5) From our discussions to date, I do not think MLA can support the display of MS Excel files in a gallery format? Correct? Do you envision this capability in future versions of MLA?

6) As mentioned in my other post, realizing the hurdles related to my needs I have put together a short-list of individuals/organizations that might be able to help, if you have some interest and availability then perhaps a brief offline discussion would be best. My Skype ID is: pcusack-pkc and I invite you to connect.

We have covered your item 5) ” … display of MS Excel files … ” is a related support topic:

Interactive Excel Sheets

I know your project has moved on from the “PDFs viewed one at a time” idea, but I’m updating this topic because I ran across a solution during my work with another user.

The Easy Fancybox plugin supports the display of a PDF document in a pop-up shadowbox window.

To configure Easy Fancybox go to the Settings/Media screen. Check the “Media: [X] PDF” box. Uncheck the “PDF: [X] AutoDetect” box (unless you want every PDF on your site displayed this way).

If you uncheck the “AutoDetect” box, you can control which galleries display the pop-up shadowbox. Create a custom markup template (Settings/Media Library Assistant screen, MLS Gallery tab). In the “Item” section you can replace “[+link+]” with:

<a title="[+title+]" class="fancybox-pdf" href="[+link_url+]">[+thumbnail_content+]</a>

I have released MLA v1.40 which lets you add a class without a custom template; add mla_link_attributes='class="fancybox-pdf"' to your [mla_gallery] shortcode. NOTE: There is a small bug (which I will fix in the next release). If you use mla_viewer=true to generate PDF thumbnails with the Google File Viewer, the mla_link_attributes parameter is ignored. I the interim, the custom markup template works well.

I am marking this issue resolved, because there is no further MLA work to be done with regard to your project. Thanks for a stimulating discussion.

Version 1.41 corrected the mla_viewer ignoring mla_link_sttributes bug.