As the summer is in its final days Creative Services is finishing up a few cleanup projects for our Cascade users. The latest (after the School of Business homepage refresh) is moving away from Flash-based photo galleries to more mobile device-friendly Javascript-based galleries.
We decided to use the Galleria Javascript and jQuery plugin which came with all of the features of our pre-existing galleries built right in. Now when you want to show a photo gallery you choose New >> Gallery in Cascade Server and indicate whether you want your photos to be pulled locally (from the current folder) or from Flickr (in which case you need to specify the Flickr set ID), whether you want to have the slideshow auto-play, and you’re set to go.
Some extra bonus features:
- If you’re using local images you don’t have to create thumbnails for each of your photos anymore; these are automatically generated for you (you should make sure the photos aren’t larger than 600px by 900px though).
- For Flickr galleries, you no longer need to get the help of a Cascade manager to create the Flickr gallery for you, so get those Flickr photos and share away.
- For both Flickr and local galleries you can choose whether or not you’d like the gallery to autoplay through the photos.
You can see these new galleries in action on the W&M Galleries pages, the Fall Seasons gallery is using images from Cascade and the Athletics gallery is pulling from Flickr. For more detailed instructions on how to build a photo gallery, visit our Cascade Help pages.
We have migrated all of the pre-existing galleries (both Flickr and local) on all of our sites. So for all your future photo gallery needs check out the latest addition to our Cascade feature set.
-Tiffany Broadbent
