While writing the previous post I’ve started experimenting with an excellent Flickr Post plugin by David McNicol which integrates photos from Flickr with WordPress posts in an automatic way.
However, I was not very comfortable with the idea of the plugin. Instead of its automatic behaviour I wanted to completely control where in the post the photos should be inserted, I also wanted to insert the photos using particular flickr tags. So I’ve created my own version of the Flickr Post plugin called Flickr Tags.
Now I can insert any tagged photos from Flickr in any place of any post in WordPress by simply inserting a line similar to this:
_ flickr:tagname _
All the magic is still done inside the functions borrowed from Flickr Post. And I am not sure whether my changes should better be integrated inside the David’s plugin or not. I’ve asked David about this and awaiting his reply.
Other imporovements:
- It is possible now to link to the photo page on Flickr (Flickr Post links to the photos directly, which is not desirable sometimes).
- It is possible to open all links in the new window.
- Small optimization: 10kb of core functions are not compiled if flickr tags are not found inside the post saving a fraction of CPU :)
There is a side effect of such a way of working with Flickr. If later you will add photos in Flickr to the tag that you’ve used inside one of the published posts, the photos will automatically appear inside that post. Not sure right now if this is good or bad, but at least this is interesting.
You can download Flickr Tags here.
Hmm, probably an even better solution would be to hook the plugin to the action that saves the post. Then we could replace the _ flickr:tag _ structure with a javascript call right in the post and so regexp parsing would not be required on every post display.
Flickr badge is working in a similar way, but it doesn’t allow you to post a photo stream based on particular tags.
This idea will probably require a separate WordPress action (or template?), that will deliver the requested photos via javascript call.
What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
Thanks.
Is it possible to use this within a WP page instead of a post?