Slideshow plugin required that can take external URLs as source images

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Hello there,

We're currently building a concrete5 site that takes in Property Listings from a provided API. The plan is to turn the scripts into a cron job to update the website regularly.

I've been able to build a new page based on the XML files given to us & create content blocks in PHP with content in them. So far so good.

However, the client wants a whizzy slideshow for the property images (as you would). To minimise development time we are looking at the plugins available on the Marketplace.

The images are stored externally. In the XML provided we are given a set of URLs which I can extract.

Does anyone know of a plugin that I can install which I can then use to call the block in PHP, using the URLs as source files as opposed to the File Manager? We don't mind paying for one of course, as long as we can initialise it/create it/configure it using PHP code instead of the usual route.

Any advice appreciated.

 
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
You could easily adapt pretty much any of the existing slideshow/slider blocks to do this with a custom template to take images (and captions?) from the external source instead of a list saved by the block edit dialog.

If I were doing it I would use a combination of my Magic Data and either my Uber List or Sorcerer's Gallery blocks. With Uber List, I would write a pair of custom symbols for magic data, one to generate a list of indexes or id's for your external list, and a second symbol that given an index or id would get the URL. If instead using Sorcerer's Gallery, I would still need to write the custom symbol to generate a list of indexes or id's, but then make a custom view that took that list and used the associated URL (instead of looking up an fID in the file manager).

Which route you take depends very much what special effects and transitions you want, how adaptable you want this to be in the future and what directions that adaptation may take.

The custom code involved would be a similar and simple amount of work for pretty much any starting point. I expect a tricky part could be enforcing equal sizes for the external images.