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Setup Guide


The set up guide details how to accomplish the following tasks in weaverPix:


  • Load images from a folder on your host


You will need the following items to get started:


  • A FTP client. These screenshots use Transmit as an FTP application, however, any FTP application you are comfortable with will work.
  • A text editor. These screenshots use TextWrangler as a text editor. TextEdit and Microsoft Word are NOT recommended.


Enable loading images from a folder


Begin by enabling the 'Load photos in folder' option in the Advanced Preferences. Note: This feature requires PHP version 5.0 or greater and will not work on MobileMe. 


Creating the data directory


The data directory is the folder where all of the photos will be stored. This folder will need to be created by hand using your favorite FTP application. Moreover, the location of the folder is important.


This tutorial assumes the following:


  1. The page exported was called index.php
  2. In your browser you would view this page by going to http://mysite.com/slideshow/demo/index.php.


Therefore you should:


  1. Connect to your host via FTP.
  2. Navigate to the slideshow/demo/ folder. In this folder you will see an index.php file and (typically) a files/ folder. The files/ folder holds all of the page's assets while the data/ folder will hold all of the photos.
  3. Now create a new folder and call it "data" (no quotes). Figure 2 shows a weaverPix page with a new data folder.


Populating the data folder


Populate the data folder with as many images as you like. Typically, PNG and JPEG images work the best. Please keep in mind, that although these images do not take up space in your RapidWeaver project file, they will consume disk space on your host. Your host may impose limitations on the amount of disk you can use.


Also, keep in mind that visitors to your site will have to download each and every image in your slideshow. Visitors with slow internet access (including mobile phones) will experience slow load times if they have to download and render many large images. For best results, try to keep the number of images in your slideshow to a minimium and the file size for each image to no more than 300KB. I personally like to keep images less than 100KB. For more tips please via my blog post on optimizing images for the web.


Adding captions and links


Links and captions may be added to images by creating a seperate text file with the same name as the photo but with a .txt extension. An example of this is shown in Figure 4.


The first line of the .txt file is used for the caption of the photo. The second line is used for the link for the photo. Note that the link value is only used if SqueezeBox is disabled in the Effects preference panel.



enable_local_folder.png

Figure 1. Enable the 'Load photos in folder' option.



data.png


Figure 2. Creating the data folder for weaverPix.



local_folder_no_caps.png

Figure 3. Adding photos to the data folder for weaverPix.



local_folder_with_caps.png

Figure 4. Adding captions for the photos in the data folder.



photo_caption_and_link.png

Figure 5. Setting the caption and link for a photo in the data folder.