I haven't written as many WordPress tutorials as usual lately, as I have been so busy building websites and blogs, so I thought I would take the time out to share a few WordPress codes I have developed recently for attachment page templates and specifically the image attachment page template. The attachment page template is the page that displays a single image when the images link URL is set to 'Post URL'. You can set the image's link URL when inserting a single image into a post, and also when using the gallery shortcode.

The codes in this article are mostly applicable to images inserted using the gallery shortcode as they are most useful for posts or pages that have multiple image attachments. Read more about using image and file attachments.

These template codes can be added to your WordPress theme using the attachment.php and image.php files. If these template files do not exist in your theme you can create them, or WordPress will default to using single.php or index.php to show attachments by default. (See more about template hierarchy).

If you don't want to create a seperate image.php or attachment.php template you can always edit the index.php or single.php files and wrap the attachment specific codes in the is_attachment clause like so:

if(is_attachment()){
//attachment page specific code goes here
}

These php functions are loosely based on code I found in this article: Adding text links to WordPress Gallery by Michael Fields. In this article he provides code examples of how to show previous and next thumbnail links in a WP attachment page. I also made use of this previous-next keys in array function which is infinitely useful!

My first set of functions will return text links for previous image, next image and back to gallery. The functions themselves will need to be added to your theme's functions.php file before calling them in your image.php or attachment.php files. So here we go:
Read on…

Get your hands on the new Street Fighter 2 widget. You can grab the widget code and embed it on your website, or even your myspace or facebook profile. This flash remake of the game is a very accurate copy of the arcade original featuring all the characters and bonus levels. If you just want to play the game on a website please follow this link:

Play Street Fighter online

This week I have been working on improving the 'Moving Image' section of photoneil.com. When I first built the site (designed and built by 76 Creative) the Moving Image page featured Neil's video showreel, since then video has become a more prominent aspect of his work so I have created a video gallery page for the site, allowing him to showcase a range of his video work under different categories.

As this video gallery uses seperate pages for the video list and the player itself I programmed it in PHP using the Longtail / JW Player to play the flv videos. For more information about encoding video for Flash as flv see my article: Encoding FLV

The video gallery also offers the option to download higher quality Quicktime Movies of each video. I encoded the quicktimes using the mpeg-4 codec and reducing the frame size slightly to allow for higher picture and sound quality while keeping the filesizes reasonable for a download.

Check it out: www.photoneil.com/movingimage.php

This simple, elegant blog was designed and built by 76 Creative (coded by me:¬)  for London based artist Zakeeya. It is powered by the Gallery Mangement feature of Admin 76, 76 Creative's custom Content Management System.

The Gallery Management system was originally intended for creating a series of galleries, rather than one huge one, so although being simple in appearance on the front end, the back end of this site still posed one or two challenges for me and allowed for improvements to be made to the CMS in the process.

Another thing I enjoyed about this site is doing a layout with a fluid width in CSS, most sites I have done are fixed width so it was interesting to change things up a bit.

I'm a big fan of simplistic / minimal websites where the content is the main focus.  Check it out:

www.zakeeya.com

I have recently been working on a highly versatile premium theme for WordPress which is due for release soon. As part of the project I wanted to test how the theme (and WordPress itself) could work with sites of various different genres. My intention was that the theme would be configurable enough via it's Options Menu that it could easily be styled to suit corporate sites such as recruitment, blue chip company, technology site  & product portfolio, media sites such as magazine, news, image & video gallery and also youth oriented sites such as music / band website,  games website.

The theme also features simple integration for banners and advertising,  so creating a couple of  'working example' sites was not only a good way of testing the theme's versatility but also a potential source of a few extra quid!

I had been wanting to do a games & videos website for a while, and I had built the theme's default settings around a 'corporate magazine' look & feel, so I decided the games site would be a great way to test the theme. Here is my wordpress games arcade site so far:  Zap Gamez

I decided to look around and see what articles I could find about creating a games arcade website with wordpress, or if there was a plugin that allowed you to easily insert games into your WordPress blog. I found this article by Emanuele Feronato:

• Creation of a Flash arcade site using WordPress

It describes a method of populating your WordPress blog with games via a feed from MochiAds (A source of free games for websites) using custom fields. However, for my site I wanted to be able to integrate games from various free content suppliers and host games on my own server as well as embedding games hosted by content suppliers. What I really wanted was a plugin that could embed games into posts or pages using shortcodes.

THE PLUGIN

The prototype plugin I have built includes the following features:

4 Different views:

1. Grid view - a grid of thumbnail images linking to each game (can be restricted to a single category or parent category)
2. Category view - this view includes a medium sized image and a written description of the game
3. Single page view - the page where you play the game itself
4. Featured Game view - a page with a list of featured games

Different embedding modes:

1. iFrame embedding - embed iFrame content using code provided by free games sites, or use this method to display games from your own server where an html file has been provided with the free game download.
2. Flash embedding - embed Flash content using embed codes provided by other sites, or embed flash games directly from your own site. You can even upload them easily using the wordpress 'Add Media' tool.

The beta version of the WP Game Embed plugin can be found here.