ATP System – Coffee & Comrades

Sunday this week was very successful on the web-development front as it involved the very successful completion of a long running project and the chance to drink some nice coffee with my friend! Although not quite polished to absolute perfection yet, my ATP (Adventure, Travel and Photography) theme/plugin for wordpress is pretty much complete. The area that needed my attention was the photo display part. To give you some background, here was my own design brief;

1. Front page to show a dynamic map of some sort that plots the positions of the articles.
2. Small excerpts with a thumbnail image of each entry.
3. A self generating menu that cross references location and activities.
4. A random image of only my travel photos.
5. Each article was to have an album of photos displayed within it that would create a neat pop-up viewer, rather than link to my gallery.
6. The design had to be ‘compatible’ with my existing website.

After about 3 months of coding and tweaking, I had everything working. The only aspect I was not 100% happy with was the implementation of the photos. I was using an application that involved loading the photos into the post itself and from there, would create a pop-up viewer and could even generate the random image I was after. What concerned me was that if I wanted the photos in my main gallery, they would be duplicated there. What I needed was a way of pulling in my gallery photos and a new way of viewing them. This was solved by actually writing a plugin that would pull the images from the gallery album and display them. A new seperate pop-up viewer was needed so that a clean-popup window could show the images with a navigation system to browse through the pictures.

I had spent all of Sunday morning creating these parts and was working on the viewer when Gringod showed up. Fueled by proper Italian coffee, we polished off the pop-up viewer and even found the time to include some Javascript that would dynamically resize the window to the photo contained within. Now the system is complete, I have added one story about when I went shark diving in South Africa. To see how the system works, browse over to http://adventure.phrixus.co.uk. As I am leaving for my holiday on Saturday, expect it to start growing soon. For major updates I will post on this part of the site but the main stories will be found there.