Media Lab Forums

[chacho]

and need to know how to add it to Sitegrinder. Is there a tutorial on the site about this?

[Eric Hussmann]

If you just want a basic slideshow the easiest thing to do is use SiteGrinder's built-in Flash slideshow creation feature.

If you want to instead include a third party Flash slideshow or other media using SiteGrinder it is also quite easy, but there might be an extra step involved depending on how the third party software sets up their media.

If everything is contained in one file then you simply create an xmedia layer (http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder/support/sg2hint_xmedia.html) and link it to the file (such as an swf file). SiteGrinder will both create the HTML to embed the media and also copy the swf file to the build folder. At that point you are finished.

Sometimes, however, the third party Flash movie depends upon other files, such as the actual images in the slideshow or an xml file to indicate various slideshow settings. SiteGrinder has no way of knowing about these additional files, so when it builds it will only copy the swf file to the build folder. After the build you will need to copy any other required files to the right place in the build folder.

For example let's say you build a slideshow using a third party product. You then open the directory containing that show and see the following files:

A file named "myslideshow.swf"
Another file named "slideshowdata.xml"
A directory called "slideshow-images"

In this case you would use SiteGrinder to link to "myslideshow.swf". You would then build, at which point SG will create your pages and copy the "myslideshow.swf" to the right place.

To complete the process you would open the SiteGrinder build folder, find the subfolder where SiteGrinder copied the "myslideshow.swf" file.

Finally copy "slideshowdata.xml" and the directory "slideshow-images" from their directory in the folder used by your third party software to the directory where SiteGrinder put the "myslideshow.swf" file.

It is very important that you keep the image files in their directory. If you copy only the individual images then the third party slideshow won't be able to find its images.