Mini Blog II. – Flickr and Textpattern

Show Flickr pix with Textpattern as mini blog. This is a follow-up to Publish mini blogs as asides.

How to get a nice Flickr mini blog inside of Textpattern

There exists a nice plugin for Textpattern which fetches pictures directly from your Flickr account. It publishes the pics directly inside the blog, can create a photo gallery from your Flickr sets and also grabs the description or lists your Flickr tags.

For the purpose of creating a mini blog based on filtered Flickr tags most convenient is the ability to hand over the Flickr tags you want to show. The following is a rough concept. For the perfect implementation you must figure out how to create the wanted txp:vdh_flickr tags yourself as there are many different possibilities.

Why not use the Flickr tag feeds?

If all this sounds way too complicated you can still use Flickr RSS feeds for your tags 🙂 But then you won’t have the possibility to have internal landing pages which is a nice way of enhancing your content.

The basics from the documentation

vdh_flickr is a full-featured gallery plugin for textpattern, using a classical three-step system: First, you are shown a set (=album) preview page, then a thumbnail page, and an image page afterwards. The Demo shows the default configuration.

But you can leave out any step, so you can for example leave out the set preview or both the set preview and thumbnails to show an individual image.

How to – Use the advanced options

The default sense of that plugin is to create a picture gallery. But of course you can simply call the txp:vdh_flickr tags individually and put them into a div which floats in your article and only shows thumbnails which link back to Flickr (open=”self|window|flickr”). More interesting is to link to another internal landing page which shows the single image with description.

Demo1 shows the default gallery Plug’n’Play Style but you can play around with the templates (Textpattern forms) as you like. Make sure to study the default Textpattern forms to get more txp:vdh_flickr tags.

• vdh_flickr_thumbnails: Specify the needed size for thumbnail images to fit your mini blog template.
• listmode=”img|text”: Funny. You can show the Thumbnails as text list
• txp:vdh_flickr_thumbnails_slideshow: You can also create a link to show a Flickr slideshow pop-up.

If you create landing pages for single pictures:

• Show image title and description
• Show a list of tags associated with the current image (local links)

Playing around with the many options you are able to generate a complete picture gallery inside your Textpattern website. More important in our mini blog case, you can create a list of thumbnails for certain tags from your Flickr photostream.

Caution

• Remember to link back to the single photo pages at Flickr.
• Double check the performance on your system and how fast Flickr responds.

Examples for a Flickr mini blog with Textpattern? Not yet…