mike hawkins – the blog

I’ve just sat down and decided to revitalise a blog (this one) that I’d started earlier this year, which, due to one thing and another was never properly implemented. Built on the excellent WordPress system I wanted a number of very specific features – relating to the display of images, YouTube embedded video and XHTML validation. Everything that I wanted had to function within in my self-constructed theme.

Requirements:

• All Pages must validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional against the W3C mark-up checking service
• Images must be displayed in a Lightbox or similar semi-transparent overlay
• YouTube video embedding method must produce valid XHTML code
• YouTube video must not mask Blackbox image display by constantly grabbing front layer
• The overlay image display must work coherently with the NextGen gallery system as well as WP gallery

I found this to be a greater (and more time consuming) task than I had anticipated and thought, that if you are trying to achieve the same goals, my experience and solution might be useful.

Clearing the decks

• Disable any plug-ins currently providing Lightbox, Slimbox etc. For image display
• Disable any YouTube embedding plug-ins (there may be some editing of posts required due to legacy code).
• Install and activate Use Google Libraries available here – I found during my many experiments that implementing this stabilised a lot things

Creating Harmony

The following collection works for me – they all seem content to work together consistently and provide me with my requirements.

1. Install and activate Artiss YouTubeEmbed –  here

Of all the methods I have tried, this delivers both the simplest way of embedding video on a site and the most sophisticated results. It delivers code that validates perfectly if you disable “Add Metadata” on the settings page and provides you with a good set of options for how the video displays. Embedding a video becomes as simple as typing youtube The Video Link /youtube (the embed code words need to be surrounded by [] square brackets) – additionally the plug-in adds an embed option to the admin bar for ease of use whilst editing.

2. Install and activate Lightbox Plus available – here

This implementation is not perhaps as feature rich as some – but provides more than enough for non-specialist usage. It is totally reliable and does not interfere with other plug-in’s functionality. Additionally it is more than happy to display NextGen gallery images without a qualm. The settings interface is very simple and self-explanatory whilst giving a great deal of control over the way images are displayed. The slideshow option is very fast and fluid compared with many others

As an additional note I use a (paid for) Nivo Slider on my site the addition of the Use Google Libraries plug-in which I mentioned earlier ironed out a lot of problems I was having with certain browsers not displaying consistently. The Nivo Slider page is – here

All in all I am very pleased with the way things have turned out – and hope that posting this will save someone the teeth-gnashing and head banging that I went through whilst wading through the enormous range of options available out there. Obviously all the above mentioned plug-ins can more easily beinstalled by the dashboard – I have include their sites out of curtesy.

Many thanks – to all the clever people that give up their time to write the amazing additions to WordPress.