Day Six -- the Gallery Search

WOW. Here was the problem I set out to solve: I needed to find a photo gallery tool for my customers who actually need to display their products. Most galleries seem to be gorged with mind-flipping rotations, skewing, fading etc, or stripped to nothing. I found something in the middle, which is HighSlide (http://vikjavev.no/highslide/ ). According to the website, the developer, Torstein Hønsi is a mudlogger on the oil rigs in the North Sea, and does web work on the side. So he actually has time to answer the occasional question! And he has a devoted following. WOW and double WOW.

The UI for these slides is fantastic. On the designer/developer side it has many many degrees of adjustability in color and in motion, transparency, position, while on the user side it is absolutely simple and elegant to look at. The documentation is great, and the comments inside the script are clear, and the examples, (which are included in the download) simplify the whole matter. In fact, you'll know right away if this is what you're looking for if you just click on the examples: http://vikjavev.no/highslide/#examples.

These are the steps I took to make sure this tool would work in Joomla:

First downloaded the tool and manually loaded the sample into my site. Worked without a tweak.

Then went to the Joomla Extensions page, to download the mambot that helps with generating the thumbnails, and uploaded through the Admin installer (it's somewhat hidden on the 3rdparty extension person's page). This did not work fine.

Then re-uploaded the highslide.js file from the vikjavev.no site, and the javascript worked fine again. However there was some extra formatting in the thumbnails, coming from somewhere in the mambot files.

For this customer I needed to strip out any fading or stretching and generate the expanded slide from a top left position. The program has the ability to expand into a specified div, and well-commented script made this simple to implement.

Had one problem with getting the positioning to work correctly in IE, but posted a message on the forum and heard back the same day. I just had to add a "position-relative" setting to the div id.

No javascript conflicts with other stuff.

So overall, this was a great experience (except for my mambot troubles). I'm looking forward to trying out this tool in a WordPress site. Triple Wow!