• Allows you to fetch all of your Flickr photosets as albums inside your gallery
• Allows you to fetch any Flickr user’s public photosets, recent photos, “favorites”, and/or “most interesting” photos (according to Flickr) and load them as albums inside your gallery
• Allows you to fetch an album of photos from a Flickr group
• Allows you to fetch an album of photos filtered by specific tags
• Allows you to fetch photos at any resolution that Flickr supports
• Allows you to fetch both public AND private Flickr photos that you have READ access
• Allows you to fetch photo descriptions from Flickr to use as photo captions inside your gallery
• Allows manual and programmatic refreshing of your XML images file, or your entire cache of Flickr API calls

The final result is a Flickr photo gallery wrapped in a premiere Flash-based slideshow interface that is delightful to your web visitors.

Visit the official Fetchr4SSP homepage!

Background

This project started for me just trying to finagle my own way of getting all my Flickr photos organized into album photosets and all available in an easy-to-use interface on one of my WordPress-driven websites. A tall order… but I knew it was doable. After fumbling with some WordPress plugins and such, nothing really worked smoothly enough. A Flash solution was needed, so purchased a license for SlideShowPro (SSP) and I couldn’t be happier!

The next task was putting together a PHP script that would build the complex XML needed to properly load all my Flickr photos organized into photosets into SSP. I tried an existing one with some success, but it lacked a few vital functions I needed… and it wouldn’t handle certain SSP abilities. Soooo, I coded my own. And after some polishing decided to put together a sharp website to peddle my fine creation to the masses.

In the end I decided to wrap everything about me into one site. The design had to be bold and vivacious, yet clean and classy. Light on dark was a given. In the end, my nuclear engineering roots provided the inspiration for the design (hence the magenta trifoil and glowing green). I titled it, Nuclear Magic.

However, this new website not only serves as my personal site but was also a great proof-of-concept for using Wordpress as a CMS. Wordpress is widely regarded as the premiere blogging software… but its potential as a CMS is profound. So many web designers and developers already have Wordpress blogs and are familiar with skinning and modding them… and the administrator interface is easy-to-use. Pound for pound you won’t get more bang for your buck when developing a dynamic website. Wordpress works great, is free, and is easier to use for what it does than anything else I’ve ever even heard of.

Everything you see at SteveMooradian.com that is not part of the site’s physical design is dynamic. This is extremely significant. ALL images are called out in CSS or in MySQL… not the source files. All main textual content is stored in MySQL. On my Web Design, Programming, and Guitar & Music pages the lists of sites, projects, and bands (respectively) are all Wordpress posts with categories matching the page title. The links at the bottom of every non-Home page are actual Wordpress “Blogroll” links with categories matching the page title. Except for the Home and Gallery pages, each page is built from identical PHP code!

All my coding was done using Notepad++. All graphic work in the design was created by myself using Adobe’s Photoshop and Fireworks software. All markup is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS3. All of the site conforms to 508 and WAI-A accessibility standards. All dynamic content is semantic. NO TABLES!

I designed the site using progressive enhancement so that I could be search-engine friendly and accessible while also providing a rich user experience to those with Flash and JavaScript-enabled browsers. Examples of progressive enhancement are as follows: I used sIFR to style my headings for users with Flash-enabled browsers. NO images were used for any headings on my site. I used swfIR to style most of my content images for users with Flash-enabled browsers. All drop-shadows and rounding on content images happen dynamically. I used GreyBox for all in-browser popups and image popup galleries for users with JavaScript-enabled browsers.

My new site has already been featured on many CSS and web design galleries… including a prestigious “Editor’s Pick” on the W3CSites.com gallery (which requires strict adherence to valid markup and web accessibility).