Pezholio

I love WordPress (hell, I use it for my blog don’t I?) and for a while I’ve been looking for an excuse to add to the community and build a plugin.

Whilst working on a new community blog for the North Lichfield Initiative I found that excuse.

The guy I was training to update the blog wanted an easy way to show Flickr slideshows on posts and pages and didn’t want to mess around with code. I first tried using Flickr Slideshow, which generates code to embed Flickr slideshows into websites, but found that the visual editor strips away the iframe code when you publish the post.

I searched and searched through the WordPress plugins, but couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted to do quickly and easily – so I rolled up my sleeves and got my hands dirty!

The result is Flickr Flash Slideshow – all you need to do is put the link the to user, set or group you want a slideshow of between [ flickr][ /flickr] tags (without the spaces) like so:

[ flickr]url[ /flickr]

You can also add the width or height of the slideshow like so:

[ flickr]url,width,height[ /flickr]

If the width and height is left out, then the plugin defaults to 300px x 300px

Check out an example here:

I was amazed by how quickly I could put it together and it’s further cemented my belief that WordPress is one of the best, if not best open source projects ever – a lot of projects could learn from its ease and extensibility.

Anyways, if you want the plugin, please Download it here and let me know if you have any problems! I’m sure it’ll come in handy for a lot of community based sites who’s users may not have enough technical knowledge to edit raw HTML.

Update: I’ve finally got access to the WordPress SVN repository, so you should be able to install it directly from your admin section – just search for ‘Flickr Flash Slideshow’