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NiO PhotoShelter RSS Gallery Widget
Fellow Photoshelter user and Dutch landscape photographer Johan Peijnenburg has been busy creating a php widget to display most recently added photos from Photoshelter galleries on a WordPress site like this one. While the Graph Paper Press templates already offer a fairly good integration with Photoshelter, this functionality has been missing. The NiO PhotoShelter RSS Gallery Widget reads the RSS feed of a Photoshelter gallery, creates cached thumbnails and displays them in a customizable gallery view. IPTC data like caption, title and keywords is being used in the thumbnail gallery, which should have a positive effect on SEO.
The new template I am using for Mediasculp is the F8 theme, one of the Graph Paper Press templates which are based on the popular Modularity theme. The first place for a RSS Gallery was the ‘inside’ area of the theme, which slides open when the visitor clicks on ‘View Work’. Originally the latest blog posts are being displayed here, but those are also being shown on the second half of the homepage. So I edited the inside.php file and replaced the code for the blog posts with Johan’s widget code. The second place for a small RSS gallery was the sidebar, which is being displayed on regular blog post and pages. Here I wanted to show the thumbnails of the recently sold photographs. An option would have been to hard-code the widget in the sidebar.php file as well, but I followed Johan’s suggestion to implement it using a text widget, which makes it easier to update the theme if necessary.
The widget is currently being tested by a handful of Photoshelter users and will be made available for download in the future. It is already a great tool for photographers to promote their work and automatically keep their website up-to-date.
