(Flash) Image Galleries
I’ve come across two excellent PHP/Flash image galleries. SimpleViewer developed by airtight Interactive. FIG is a simple, intuitive interface and design for a Flash gallery that doesn’t need much programming. It supports multiple galleries and simple image descriptions. The color styles of the gallery can be changed to match your existing site. The borders, background, and navigation colors can all be changed. When there is only one gallery, the interface changes. The gallery name is displayed at the top, the home button is removed, and the thumbnails load immediately. And it’s FREE!
SimpleViewer is an intelligent image pre-loading flash gallery, it has a very intuitive image navigation and it’s very lightweight (around 17k). You can easily customize the interface - Set text color, frame color and width, navigation position. You can resize the interface as well. Sicne it’s Flash it’s Cross platform - Windows/Macintosh/Linux, however, it requires Flash 7 or higher. It has this nifty Optional right-click to open image in a new window feature - and it’s also FREE!
Another good implementation for a gallery that you are building or customizing is using the Lightbox2 JS library. Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers. Lots of things are built on this library, like the Suckerfish HoverLightbox,
Tabs and News Like Scripts
Ajax Tabs Content uses Ajax to let you display a selection of external content on your page inside a DIV and via CSS tabs! It’s pretty much like Yahoo’s new homepage, which employs such a concept to show news in an organized fashion.
Featured Content Slider makes a slideshow out of arbitrary content on your page, so users can manually select a content to see or have them rotated automatically. Pagination links let the user quickly pick a content to show. Each content is simply normal HTML wrapped in DIV tags for effortless integration. An excellent tool if you need to display something and you don’t have enough space - or not! This works like the Virtual Pagination script except that the latter is lightweight. You might as well like the Animated Collapsible DIV if you’re short on space.
I also found the Unobtrusive AJAX Star Rating Bar, from Masuga Design Labs, which is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done on Netflix or Amazon, all web 2.0-like with no page refresh.
CSS Speech Bubbles is easy to customize speech bubbles coded in CSS and valid XHTML 1.0 strict, that works on Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.0, and Opera 9.0. Made by Will Mayo.
Last but not least, the Easy Tabs from Koller Jürgen, which is a very nifty tabs menu that works on hover or onclick instant content display. Very lightweight and easily customizable.
