I’m trying to put together a web site with several portfolio pages for different projects. I’m an architectural designer with ZERO web site design, HTML, CSS, coding, etc. experience and I do NOT want to learn it. I want to avoid using Flash!
I’m breaking the pages down into 4 project types. Each type will have 4-6 projects. Each project will have 4 to 8 images (architectural drawings, 3D models and photos) all shrunk down in Photoshop. I trying to keep it simple.
I want to do simple slide shows for each project, with forward and back arrow buttons and no fancy transitions.
I’ve been trying to find a way to do this, but Freeway Pro’s documentation is sparse. I’ve hunted around and found some JavaScript stuff… mooTools, Jon’s SmoothGallery 2… the documentation for that is opaque to me, with little guidance to help using it with Freeway.
I’m finding this extremely daunting. Is there something simple and preferably built-into Freeway that will let me do this?
Inside the pack is an action called “moo: Slideshow Gallery” and I think that’s what you want. You’d draw out an HTML item to the size of your images, apply the specific action to it, and then you’d change the slideshow in the Action’s palette to be like “Showcase Gallery.” This will require the user to navigate through the images rather than have it be timed. I think there’s also a way to do timed and navigation-able.
If you have question’s post them here and hopefully it does what you need it to.
Remember also that if you use any of the Scriptaculous Actions it won’t work. They clash and Weaver (Action Developer) is working on that.
If you really want something simple, with no coding, then I would do this:
In Freeway, in your site pane, make a new folder to hold your first slide show. Add a page to that folder, and draw three graphic boxes on it. Make one the central photo, make the other two into left and right arrows, and lay them out how you like.
Apply the Link to Page Action to the left and right arrows, and set them appropriately (previous and next).
Now duplicate this page as many times as needed to fill your slide show needs, and change the central photo.
There is no step 4.
To use the slide show, just make a link to the first page in the folder from outside that folder. So if you have an index page with a description of each slide show, then link from there to the first page in each slide show’s folder.
The Link to Page Action generates forward and back links based on the sort order of the pages in your Freeway document. If you want to change the order that the pictures appear, just drag and drop the pages in the Site pane to sort them into the order you prefer.
There is one dark cloud in all this sunshine and happiness - every time you publish your site, all of these pages (and all of their contents) will upload again. The Action has to “dirty” all the pages in order to figure out if the page order has changed, so this is the price you pay for the automation.
If you really want something simple, with no coding, then I would do this:
There is one dark cloud in all this sunshine and happiness
Walter,
Thanks. I gave it a try and it seems to work. I wasn’t able to figure out how to make the forward/back buttons work.
The downside is that I have about 20 projects and 150+ images to display. It seems to mean the page will reload for every image switch so I think it’s ultimately going to be too unwieldy for what I want to do. if I had only a few images, it would be fine.
I want my images to appear in a specific order (a few projects have 10 or more images) and Carousel seems a bit clunky in that regard, stacking image frames on top of each other. Editing or changing images seems as though it would be nightmareish later on.
I also tried ActionsWorld Gallery Lite, but that seems to only allow a grid of thumbnails. It doesn’t even seem to do slideshows. Gotta love sparse documentations for non-intuitive things!
Inside the pack is an action called “moo: Slideshow Gallery” and I think that’s what you want.
Hey Dan,
Well, I tried the MooToolsSuite and the SlimBox slideshow component. It worked pretty well. Thanks for the suggestion!
There was one major glitch: depending on how you apply the mootools SlimBox Action to an object, you get different slideshow functions. I stumbled on it by accident and ended up rebuilding all my slideshows (25) to get them the way I wanted. A major pain, but it all works now and looks pretty good.
The site went live yesterday and I fixed all the glitches today. Check it out!