When I set out to add database driven player info at NuggetsHoops.com, I knew that I wanted to include code that would display some of the many images that I had set aside for each NBA player. I also knew that I would continue to add new pictures. Application code that could easily display old and new images, without additional effort for each added image would work best.
I had already written PHP code that could look at a folder and create a list of images to be displayed. When I ran across the powerful jQuery Cycle Plugin, I had found a great way to display them.
Let’s get coding. This tutorial depends on PHP 5, jQuery 1.2.3 or later, jQuery Cycle Plugin version 2.51 or later.
- I’ll assume you already have Apache and PHP setup and running. Make sure you have a recent version of PHP 5.
- Download jQuery
- Download jQuery Cycle Plugin
Add the following Javascript to your PHP/HTML to enable and call the Cycle Plugin:
| Javascript | | | | ? |
| 1 | <script src="/scripts/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> |
| 2 | <script src="/scripts/jquery.cycle.all.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> |
| 3 | <script type="text/javascript"> |
| 4 | $(document).ready(function(){ |
| 5 | $('#myslides').cycle({ |
| 6 | fit: 1 |
| 7 | }); |
| 8 | }); |
| 9 | </script> |
Note that there are many options and styles of animation provided by the powerful Cycle plugin.
Add the following PHP to iterate over any folder and dynamically generate img tags using any images found in the folder:
| PHP | | | | ? |
| 01 | $directory = 'images/players/' . $row['imageName']; |
| 02 | try { |
| 03 | // Styling for images |
| 04 | echo "<div id=\"myslides\">"; |
| 05 | foreach ( new DirectoryIterator("../" . $directory) as $item ) { |
| 06 | if ($item->isFile()) { |
| 07 | $path = "/" . $directory . "/" . $item; |
| 08 | echo "<img src=\"" . $path . "\" />"; |
| 09 | } |
| 10 | } |
| 11 | echo "</div>"; |
| 12 | } |
| 13 | catch(Exception $e) { |
| 14 | echo 'No images found for this player.<br />'; |
| 15 | } |
Any img tags within an HTML element of class ‘myslides’ (or whatever you initialized the Cycle plugin with in the Javascript) will have the slideshow behavior added to it. The $row array on line 1 is referencing a database query result, but could be set in a number of ways for your specific needs. The DirectoryIterator reference on line 5 is a builtin class in PHP5.
Here’s the CSS to style the images being displayed in the slideshow:
| CSS | | | | ? |
| 01 | #myslides { |
| 02 | width: 340px; |
| 03 | float: right; |
| 04 | padding: 0; |
| 05 | margin: 0 auto; |
| 06 | margin-top: 20px; |
| 07 | } |
| 08 | |
| 09 | #myslides img { |
| 10 | padding: 10px; |
| 11 | border: 1px solid rgb(100,100,100); |
| 12 | background-color: rgb(230,230,230); |
| 13 | width: 320px; |
| 14 | top: 0; |
| 15 | left: 0 |
| 16 | } |
So, there’s a very quick walk thru a working example to generate a dynamic slideshow from any folder of images. If you’d like a full download of the code, or any further explanation, please leave a comment!
You can see this code in action by just clicking on any player’s name at the NuggetsHoops.com Roster page.
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 AM
Hi developer,
I have just test your code above.. and I have already put all the images under images/players/ and put all the images like 1.jpg, 2.jpg..etc.. and same as you did. how come it doesn’t work it always display “No images found for this player.”
June 2nd, 2009 at 2:21 AM
Hi developer,
I have just test your code above.. and I have already put all the images under images/players/ and put all the images like 1.jpg, 2.jpg..etc.. and same as you did. how come it doesn’t work it always display “No images found for this player.” can you email me the source code for this.. I like jquery so much
thanks and regards
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:48 PM
jjmc,
Make sure the path to your images folder is correct, based on lines 1 and 5 in the PHP source. I had to add “../” in the arg sent to the DirectoryIterator because my PHP file was in a subfolder, so the path to get to my images folder was ../images/players/anthony and so on. That path is relative to where your PHP file is on your server.
Hope that helps! I’ll be happy to post the full source here, but won’t be able to get to that for another day or two.
June 7th, 2009 at 5:42 AM
thanks developer for replying.. what I’ve got now is that it is now displaying the image..but my problem now is that , it is animating. it’s only shows the image.
also is it possible to do some descriptions everytime it loads the image.. can we do like that.. here is the code that i have..
can you help me on this please…or any suggestions
Untitled Document
$(document).ready(function(){
$(‘#myslides’).cycle({
fit: 1, pause: 1, height: 360
});
});
#myslides {
width: 340px;
float: right;
padding: 0;
margin: 0 auto;
margin-top: 20px;
}
#myslides img {
padding: 10px;
border: 1px solid rgb(100,100,100);
background-color: rgb(230,230,230);
width: 320px;
top: 0;
left: 0
}
<?php
$directory = ‘/test/images/players/’ . $row['imageName'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo “”;
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator(“../” . $directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile()) {
$path = “/” . $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
echo “”;
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo ‘No images found for this player.’;
}
?>
August 30th, 2009 at 12:28 PM
include (‘db_connect.php’);
$select=mysql_query(“select * from images”);
while($row=mysql_fetch_array($select))
{
$directory = ‘images/players/’ . $row['pic'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo “”;
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator(“../../” . $directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile()) {
$path = “/” . $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
echo “”;
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo ‘No images found for this player.’;
}
}
?>
August 30th, 2009 at 12:30 PM
can u please help me to debug this code.
my image is under images/player/pic1.jpg
am having this on my browser as result
No images found for this player.
thanks you
September 1st, 2009 at 12:11 AM
San,
It appears that your image and your directory code are not in sync. On line 7, from my example I was looking for player images in “images/players/…” while you’ve stated that placed your image in “images/player/…”.
If that’s not your issue, can you provide a link to where you are trying this?
Alan
September 1st, 2009 at 3:11 AM
hello
am new with php and am getting confused
my main folder is images
and my images is in the folder player
can u please tell me how to write it???
thanks you..
u r so nice
September 1st, 2009 at 4:06 AM
thanks a lot Sir,
now it is working and i have found my mistake..
but with your code, the slideshow is taking all the picture in the folder and displaying it.
but me i want to take picture that are from a dataabase
my code
$select=mysql_query(‘select photosproduit from produit where isslide=’1”)
please help me to implement this part in my code..
thank you
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:02 AM
Excellent – glad to hear that you got it working! I was about to post that I will be adding a zipfile of the code from this tutorial to make it easier for people to get started.
As for pulling images from a database – are you storing the entire binary image in the database or just the path to the image on your server?
September 2nd, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Thank You
the path of the images that is inserted in the database is uploads/picture1.jpg
and the folder uploads is on my server.
can you help me please..
October 8th, 2009 at 10:38 PM
Hello,
Your script is awesome. Coupling jQuery and PHP for a slideshow like this is perfect. The only problem that I encountered is that with this code Safari loads each image onto the page for a little while until all of the images are loaded and then switches to a single image and runs the slideshow as it should. Any ideas on how to solve this? Safari is a PITA but as a mac user I always try to accommodate it.
December 14th, 2009 at 4:29 AM
Very nice and useful tutorials to web designers,
Thanks for posting.
January 6th, 2010 at 1:08 AM
timska77 – Thanks! Strange – I don’t see that behavior in Safari 4 on Mac or PC. Are you seeing this issue with an older version of Safari?
Here’s my test example, which uses a slightly modified version of the code from this tutorial:
http://www.nuggetshoops.com/players/view.php?pid=1
January 30th, 2010 at 12:41 PM
Really,
Great jobs 1 million kisses & hugs is not enough for you
Appreciate your efforts.
Thank you very much
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:47 AM
Appreciate your efforts.
Thank you very much
May 20th, 2010 at 10:17 PM
thanks a lot Sir,
now it is working and i have found my mistake..
but with your code, the slideshow is taking all the picture in the folder and displaying it.
but me i want to take picture that are from a dataabase
my code
$select=mysql_query(‘select photosproduit from produit where isslide=’1”)
please help me to implement this part in my code..
thank you
May 21st, 2010 at 10:59 PM
Appreciate your efforts.
Thank you very much
May 28th, 2010 at 8:41 AM
How come in Safari when this first loads it displays the little “image not found” icon, but then proceeds to play the slideshow. Any ideas how to solve this? Other than that this script is absolutely perfect and exactly what I was looking for.
Cheers
May 28th, 2010 at 9:30 AM
I’m unable to reproduce that issue, but I’m testing with Safari 4.0.5 on Windows. Are you seeing the problem on a Mac, or on a different version of Safari? I can test on a Mac this weekend and see if I can reproduce it there.
Are you seeing the broken image when running my demo page, or when trying the script on your own?
May 31st, 2010 at 6:08 PM
I am using a Mac. It only shows when I use the script on my own with my own images. On your demo page it runs fine and completely unaltered it runs fine as well. Thanks for the swift response, you’re awesome.
Cheers
June 1st, 2010 at 4:01 AM
hey i am trying to implement the jquery cycle plugin in my project and i get the following error when trying to run it
” Undefined variable: row ”
my diresctory points to ‘../images/clients/’
any help?
June 4th, 2010 at 9:30 PM
I would like to comment on this blog by adding that web standard are greatly important. Take a look at what is currently happening between HTML5 and Apple.
June 28th, 2010 at 10:23 AM
Congratulations! You have just won a new feed reader
.. really awesome article, Mike.
July 5th, 2010 at 8:45 AM
[...] Read this tutorial >> [...]
July 8th, 2010 at 11:51 PM
how can you do the same thing but showing on a 3 rows basis, one row is very easy , all the Cycle stuff works on one row but when it comes to fetching database and showing three rows is a nightmare
July 9th, 2010 at 7:52 PM
[...] Tutorial [...]
July 19th, 2010 at 4:22 PM
Hi:
I’ve been looking for a php script that automates jQuery slideshows. this is a gem of a find. thank you.
I have a quick question. I’m using this script in a cms. Any image upload will generate an auto thumbnail. how can i modify the php code to bypass the thumbnails? currently, both image1.jpg and thumb_image1.jpg are showing.
thank you.
July 22nd, 2010 at 1:31 AM
jingle:
Do you want to show 3 images at the same time, but pull them from a database rather than a folder on the server?
KP:
You should be able to just add a regexp to the if statement that checks if the current item is a file in the PHP file… that will filter out your auto-generated thumbnails from the CMS.
Try this new version of line 6:
if ($item->isFile() && !preg_match(‘/^thumb_/’, $item)) {
I also created a new demo to show it working. The top slideshow will display the thumbnail, the bottom one doesn’t.
July 23rd, 2010 at 7:21 PM
Hey Allan:
I’m no php programmer so let me make sure i understand.
I should replace
$directory = ‘uploads/images/slideshow’ . $row['image'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo “”;
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator(“” . $directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile()) {
$path = “/newsite/” . $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
echo “”;
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo ‘No images found for this player.’;
}
WITH
$directory = ‘uploads/images/slideshow’ . $row['image'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo “”;
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator(“” . $directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile() && !preg_match(‘/^thumb_/’, $item)) {
$path = “/newsite/” . $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
echo “”;
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo ‘No images found for this player.’;
}
July 24th, 2010 at 12:28 PM
Alan:
sorry to bother. I get an error with the new php line. My code currently reads:
$directory = ‘uploads/images/slideshow/’ . $row['imageName'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo “”;
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator(“” . $directory) as $item ) {
// if ($item->isFile()) {
if ($item->isFile() && !preg_match(‘/^thumb_/’, $item)) {
$path = “/newsite/” . $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
echo “”;
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo ‘No images found for this player.’;
}
the error is:
# invalid code entered.
# Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘^’ eval()’d code on line 7
any ideas? the website is http://keepsakefamilytreevideo.com/newsite/
thanks for your help.
kp
July 26th, 2010 at 10:24 AM
No problem KP – I’m happy to try and help. I think the issue might be from the way my WordPress theme has styled the characters, or the way I cut and paste the code sample.
Make sure the quote right after !preg_match is not the back-tick character. It should be a straight single quote. I think that’s why you are getting a syntax error from PHP. The ending quote also needs to be a single quote.
Let me try again to show that line of code here:
if ($item->isFile() && !preg_match(‘/^thumb_/’, $item)) {
Basically, what that line of code does is check to see if the current item in the loop IS a file and IS NOT a file starting with the name “thumb_”.
NOTE: After posting this comment, I can see it has the same issue… must be something in this theme that I need to look into. Anyway, on your keyboard, make sure you replace the quote after !preg_match( with the one below the double quotes key next to the Enter key on a standard keyboard. Also fix the ending quote immediately after ^thumb_/. If this doesn’t work, I’ll try and post the entire example file here as a download this week.
Let me know how it goes!
July 29th, 2010 at 11:01 AM
Alen:
Got it fixed. yes, it does need to be single quote. I don’t see very well and I did not notice the quotes were wrong. thanks for helping.
July 29th, 2010 at 11:02 AM
Alen:
Got it fixed. yes, it does need to be single quote. I did not notice the quotes were wrong. thanks for helping.
August 13th, 2010 at 2:30 AM
Alan,
Great article, but I’ve problems with the $(document).ready(function()-function in all latest browsers: all images load shortly before the WordPress-page loads.
It’s very frustrating, because I’ve read a lot of articles about this problem.
Can you help me ?
The code in header.php:
$(document).ready(function(){
$(‘#myslides’).cycle({
fit: 1, pause: 2
});
});
<?php
$directory = 'wp-content/themes/iblog2/images/slideshow/' . $row['imageName'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo "”;
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator($directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile()) {
$path = $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
echo “”;
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo ‘No images found for this slideshow.’;
}
?>
Thanks in advance,
Niels
August 17th, 2010 at 9:29 PM
For anyone that was experiencing the same problem as me, I finally figured out the one broken image thing, it was because the slideshow was taking the .DS_store hidden file in the folder as an image and trying to display it, so deleting it did the trick. I feel pretty stupid lol
August 19th, 2010 at 2:39 AM
I was looking for that php code.. works fine.. tks
September 7th, 2010 at 11:01 PM
G’day Alan,
Works great – I simplified the CSS for a borderless display and wrote in an Auto-refresh line as well. One question though – what would be a straight forward way for this to support multiple formats, possibly PDF or MP4? I assume you’d have to link the libraries/players for those formats into the script..
Cheers,
Michael
September 8th, 2010 at 11:08 PM
And here’s one more tricky one.. Is there any way to get the PHP script to auto-generate a new page and refresh when content is changed in the image directory? Trying to save bandwidth by not getting our script to auto refresh every 10 mins.
February 9th, 2011 at 7:22 PM
The code is good except for the problem of not showing the first/last image. Using your own images works fine but using else images causes this problem. I wonder why it should be this way. Well done for the good job but this problem has stopped me from using the code. Thanks again…
February 17th, 2011 at 10:58 AM
This is great, thanks for that. I added a small line to check for the file extension of the files in the directory. This will only output files that end in “.jpg”:
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator($directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile()) {
//get the file extension
$fileExt = substr($item, strrpos($item, ‘.’) + 1);
//only display files that end in jpg
if ($fileExt == ‘jpg’) {
$path = $directory . “/” . $item;
echo “”;
}
}
}
March 5th, 2011 at 11:20 AM
I am getting the following parse error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘{‘ in /home/vg008web07/94/29/2912994/bhamfashionweek/web/fullsite000/index.php on line 100
Any ideas as to what the deal is? Here is my php:
[code]
<?php
$directory = 'images/slideshow/' . $row['imageName'];
try {
// Styling for images
echo "";
foreach ( new DirectoryIterator("../" . $directory) as $item ) {
if ($item->isFile()) {
$path = "/" . $directory . "/" . $item;
echo "";
}
}
echo "";
}
catch(Exception $e) {
echo 'No images found for this player.';
}
?>
[/code]
March 5th, 2011 at 11:26 AM
Gabe: I can’t spot an error, and an online PHP syntax checker doesn’t detect any either in your code.
Two questions:
1. What version of PHP is your server running? You can check with your host provider or run php_info(); on your page to see a report.
2. What line in your PHP does line 100 appear to point to?
March 5th, 2011 at 11:41 AM
Ahh, it was the PHP version. Upgraded and all is working. So sorry to miss something so small!
Also, thanks for your speedy response!!! Great plugin/work!
March 5th, 2011 at 11:49 AM
Gabe: Excellent – glad you got it working… no worries at all Happy coding!
March 11th, 2011 at 5:56 AM
Awesome code, working fine for me, thanks for sharing…..
April 14th, 2011 at 8:23 AM
[...] Tutorial [...]
April 23rd, 2011 at 7:53 AM
The problem is that when you get the filename of the first image, it includes the .DS_Store file. So if you’re directory is www/images/, the first file will read as, www/images/.DS_Store. You have to check to make sure that it only includes .jpg, .png etc …
May 1st, 2011 at 8:21 PM
is there a way to make this compatible with jquery 1.4.2?
May 1st, 2011 at 10:07 PM
also, my slideshow sits in a header file that way it will always display no matter what page, however the current path “images/slideshow/” only works on the homepage because its appended to the base url “example.com” but when you go to another page “example.com/page1″ it doesn’t load because i’m assuming it’s searching for “example.com/page1/images/slideshow/”. anyway around this?
May 3rd, 2011 at 5:03 AM
Really good code but a single problems :
When i used this slide show a blank image run in my script name
Thumb.jpg i don’t understand this error
Please help me
May 16th, 2011 at 4:18 AM
blex – I’ve recently updated the demo page to use jQuery 1.4.4 and it works just fine:
http://www.ampedwebstandards.com/demos/dynamic-image-slideshow-php-jquery/
May 16th, 2011 at 4:22 AM
blex – as for the slideshow in a header file and it handling different paths, you could update the line that says:
$directory = ‘images/slideshow/’;
to be something like this:
$directory =’/images/slideshow/’;
That way the script would always look for the images folder in the root of your domain. If that doesn’t solve the problem for you, let me know and I’ll work out a way to make the script more flexible or take the path as an optional argument related to the current page the php file is getting loaded from.
May 16th, 2011 at 4:40 AM
treck:
I’ve got an updated version of the script that only displays files with certain extensions working. I just need to do a little more testing with it and then I’ll update the page with a new download verison.
Alan
May 18th, 2011 at 4:12 AM
when i do as you demonstrated i got no error but again there no image playing so what can i do
May 18th, 2011 at 10:12 AM
Ssemwanga – is this your first comment here? You make it sound as if you have tried this tutorial more than once with no success.
Do you see the message “No images found for this player” on the page where you are trying to create the slideshow? Do you see other text on the page (that you wrote) or is it blank?
Do you have access to your server logs?
Another idea is to try adding a small snippet of PHP code *after* where you are attempting to display the slideshow. In this way, you can see if the slideshow is causing an error in PHP where it won’t continue to process PHP code on your page.
Just add something like this < ?php echo "Made it here!" ?>
June 2nd, 2011 at 6:35 PM
Hey, I really don’t think saying this on your post Tutorial: Dynamic slideshow with PHP & JQuery would be the appropriate place but I couldn’t locate a contact page form within your somewhat messy theme (sorry). My readers would always tell me exactly the same thing so I switched over to a new theme from http://tinyurl.com/themeforestz. I’ve only gotten kind comments after. Regards, Lorrie Gilboy
June 5th, 2011 at 5:19 AM
I know this is really boring and you are skipping to the next comment, but I just wanted to throw you a big thanks – you cleared up some things for me!
June 12th, 2011 at 9:37 PM
good blog man, I really admire your writing style that you are using for your posts and stuff, really hollywood…
June 16th, 2011 at 8:36 AM
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the clearly written demo. To be honest, the download package is a total winner! An entire working example to reverse engineer!
Awesome.
Keep up the great work. I’ll look around your site briefly to click on some ads, if you have any.
gare
June 16th, 2011 at 7:32 PM
It would be nice to add a Next and Back button. How would you do this?
June 16th, 2011 at 11:29 PM
William – I think that would be doable. I’ll take a crack at adding that and adding it as a configuration option. I’ll update the tutorial and the download if I can work it out in the next week or so, and add a comment. Check back in a few!
June 21st, 2011 at 7:03 PM
Thanks for looking into it Alan.
WBR
July 24th, 2011 at 2:49 AM
please put slideshows that independence from languages
August 25th, 2011 at 4:59 PM
This is great. Thank you! I’ve been trying to make a JQuery/PHP slideshow work for one of my clients and this tutorial is so clear and useful. Working wonderfully.
November 22nd, 2011 at 12:57 PM
Hi Allan
I went through the tutorial and its a real help for someone whose new to php and jquery too. I wanted a help regarding the slideshow content. Is there any way through which we can also add content for the slideshow as per the image. I appreciate any quick response from your side.
Thanks in advance.
Renu.
November 22nd, 2011 at 1:20 PM
Renu – are you asking about having text or html associated with each image in the slideshow? If so, yes… have definitely thought about that for my own use. I haven’t come up with a clean solution that wouldn’t take away from the easy way of adding new content that I have in place right now though. One thought would be to have the slideshow code look for a file like “descriptions.txt” that it could parse and add descriptions/captions for any matching filenames in that file. If it didn’t find one, it would still just show the image as it does today. If that sounds good I’ll add that to my future features for this tutorial and post an update in a future version.