STL Social Media Guy

I spent a good chunk of my weekend trying to figure out how to make a really nice slide show for my church’s web site. I knew what I wanted. What I found was a pretty slick plugin for WordPress called Flickr Tag. (Here’s the WordPress.org page for the same plugin.)

There. I’ve avoided burying the lead. Now, on to the rest of the story.

First, I wanted to use Flickr for the back-end. It’s a pretty simple tool, it allows more flexibility for dealing with batch photos than WordPress, it can absorb the storage overhead better than my church’s site can and, frankly, it’s another way to draw people to our content (and, honestly, to our church site).

Second, I wanted a way to display the content ON the church site.

Third, I wanted to see if we could do some slick display options, such as a lightbox effect on the site. I’m no programmer, so if it wasn’t easy, I wasn’t going to be able to do it.

Turns out, I tried at least four other plugins that purported to do exactly what I wanted. I’m not going to name them here because all of them got rave reviews from other users — but I couldn’t make any of them work. Even Flickr Tag hit a snag for me — but, fortunately, someone else had the exact same glitch. The solution was a quick edit to the header.php file that even I had the wherewithal to manage.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s anything you can’t do with a plugin.

The slide show, by the way, was from a walkathon our church sponsored, raising money for a well in an area of the southern Sudan. That’s my kids and me in the photo above.

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