Ooo - interesting idea, a slide show with a comments box... I reckon I could put that together :)

How do you see this working? The main issue I can see, is that if the slideshow is auto rotating, dumb users might forget to pause the slideshow to enter their comments, and then loose them whe nthe show moves onto the next image. I guess possible ways round that are to automagically pause the slide show when the user focuses on the comments box; Only allow comments to be added on a separate click through page; or only show the comments box if the slideshow is paused.

What do you think? post any ideas you have on how you would like this to look and work and I'll see what I can knock together :)

Jon

Hi! :)

A few things:

1. If you do end up putting it together, please explain how you managed! Then I'll be able to tweak it and further my C5 development knowledge.

2. In my concept, the comments box would be shown below the slideshow. The comments for each image would come into view as the image does. Also, I think pausing the slideshow when users focus on the comments box would be the way to go here.

3. It must "fit" the custom Slideshow block I've made; I can attach it here or send it by e-mail if you'd like.

Thanks for offering the help!

you could possibly use js/css to show/hide each guestbook...

Yes, I was planning on doing that. :) I need more help with the php/mysql side of things here.

You're probably going to need to add a separate Guestbook block for each image on the page, then show/hide them with javascript depending on which image is being displayed.

I'm not sure there is a way to automate the addition of these guestbook blocks for all of the images, so whoever is managing the content of the site will need to add a number of guestbook blocks equal to the number of images in the gallery.

And there is not going to be an easy way to uniquely identify each guestbook block with each image, but you could maybe just assume that the first guestbook block on the page is for the first image in the gallery, the second guestbook block is for the second image, etc.

So... ideally there is some kind of callback function you can add to your image gallery's setup options. This function should figure out which image is currently being displayed (like the 1st, 2nd, 5th, whatever), and then loop through all of the guestbook blocks on the page (I'm assuming they will all share a CSS id of some kind), and show the 1st, 2nd, 5th, whatever (and hide all of the rest).

This is totally hack-ish but might actually work. Two things I would look out for:

1) If you change the order of the images in the gallery, or you remove an image from the middle of the gallery, or you add a new image in the middle of the gallery, all of your guestbook blocks will get out of alignment. So you're kind of going to be stuck with whatever image set you have once you start getting comments (although you could add or remove from the end of the gallery and that might not be a problem).

2) You're probably going to want the javascript that shows/hides guestbook blocks to only be outputted when NOT in edit mode -- otherwise you'll have no way of accessing them to edit/delete blocks when in edit mode.

Best of luck.

-Jordan

I have quite a nice solution to these issues I think, but want to get it up and running before I reveal too much ;)

Megan, can you send me your custom slideshow, so I can use that as a template?

Should have it ready pretty quick :)

Jon

Jon,

Sounds good! The solution posted above wouldn't work for me...this has to be easy to add via edit mode because the photographer will be the one maintaining it for me; also, some of the galleries will be in random order like the test gallery.

I'll attach a zip folder of my Gallery block so that you can work with it.

Hi Jon, did you ever find a solution to this? I'm looking to do something similar as well.