My Joomla SmoothGallery + Lightbox Installation

I needed a simple Joomla slideshow recently. After downloading, installing, and taking test drives of a few of them, I decided to go with the Joomla SmoothGallery + Lightbox Mambot.

I had to make a few hacks to make it work for me, so I’ll go ahead and list those later in the post. First, we’ll go over download and installation.

You can download the SmoothGallery + Lightbox Mambot by visiting the oscandy.com site. I went with their latest Version 1.1.3.

You install it as any Mambot:

1. fire up your admin
2. select Installers => Mambots
3. browse for bot_smoothgallery_1.*.*.zip
4. select Upload File & Installation

Now you’ll need to publish the Mambot:

1. select Mambots => Site Mambots
2. select SmoothGallery Mambot : Published

Play with the Settings:

1. select Mambots => Site Mambots
2. select SmoothGallery Mambot

When pulling images from a folder (or who knows why), I’d noticed that not the settings options here seemed to control the slide show. I may be wrong, but I’ll touch on this later.

Now, what I wanted to do was put a slideshow on my Home page, which I’ve got setup as a Static Content Item. I’d went ahead and added a few JavaScript files on my TEMPLATE‘s index.php page found here.

I then followed the Images from Folder instructions from the SmoothGallery + Lightbox site:

http://www.oscandy.com/joomla/22-smoothgallery-lightbox-joomla-mambot

What I did to add the slideshow to my Home page:

1. select Static Content Manager
2. select My Home Page Item
3. insert this tab on the page:

{smoothgallery folder=/images/stories/slideshow&timed=true&delay=9000}

With your images in the folder shown above, your slideshow should start working for you. I came across a bug which kept either the caption and title from appearing. It seemed to have problems picking up the iptc information. The backup rule of printing the image filename was not working as well. I hacked smoothgallery.class.php to get me a working alternative.

Also, there’s some issues with some of the image functions used. Either you’re page will just die, and/or you’ll see the following error in your error logs:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagecreatefromjpeg()

There’s an issue with php-gd not being installed on some Linux installations (CentOS 5 and Fedora Core 5 in my experience), so you’ll need to install it:

yum install php-gd
/usr/sbin/apachectl restart

I think that’s all I’ve got for now. There looks to be a bug in IE 7 which is keeping the title/caption from popping up, so I’ll be taking a look into that too. All in all, the Joomla Mambot SmoothGallery + Lightbox is pretty snazzy.

Post written by Ed Reckers

Founder and lead web development consultant at Red Bridge Internet : San Francisco WordPress Developers and Consultants.

3 Responses to “My Joomla SmoothGallery + Lightbox Installation”

  1. sndyan

    thanks very much . but for Joomla at self do you have any explaining??

  2. sndyan

    again all , i want your help in making my site have the same comment system and have also the same way for url for authors and – with all my sorry- the same way in displaying the history .. can you help me ?? thanks veyy very much

  3. tony

    hi
    how do i setup name title to the pictures?

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