Living Open Source

The list of WordPress Driven churches continues to grow, so I thought it was time to find a more impressive way to show off some of the links. A while back I managed to squeeze the impressive SmoothGallery into my UPSILON WordPress theme. So after a couple of hours chilling out over some PHP and CSS code, I managed to come up with a WordPress plugin that grabs all the church links from WordPress, uses WebSnapr to get a thumbnail of each and then throws them up for the world to see in SmoothGallery. You can see it in action on the churches page of my blog.

If I release this plugin, you could put SmoothGallery on any theme and use it to cycle through links in your blogroll. But there are a couple of issues to resolve:

• SmoothGallery 2.0 seems to have problems in Internet Explorer. The current plugin installed here is using an older version of SmoothGallery.
• SmoothGallery uses MooTools which thows up conflicts when using other plugins like lightbox that uses other JavaScript libraries. [UPDATE: use LyteBox instead with SmoothGallery!]
• Looking at using phpThumb to resize any image you associate with a link and cache images.
• Well, it all takes time…

Anyway hope you enjoy going ooh and ah as you see all those great WordPress driven church web sites.