Show Off Your Photos With Cascade Server Slide Show

The IET web team has put together a slide show application that you can add quickly and easily to your Cascade Server website. St. Mary's County helped to test out the new application by publishing photos from their 2009 4-H Bull Roast fundraiser. You can see their slide show live online as an example.

Cascade Server users can create their own slide shows as easily as they create any other web page. Simply upload your image files to a new folder, then creating a new Slideshow Page the same way you create a new blank web page. You have to paste in the ID number for the folder that holds the images, but otherwise everything else is exactly the same. "We'll be teaching people how to create slide shows in the level three Cascade Server training on October 8," says IET's web trainer Sue Johnston. For those who are anxious to try it out before then, Sue has also put together a quick-reference PDF tutorial.

"We had a lot of demand for a slide show feature," says Mark Shute, AGNR Web Manager. "But it was a tricky thing to make it easy to use. People have a certain expectation of web slide shows today--they're ubiquitous on blogs and social networks. We wanted our content providers to be able to create that kind of slide show within our AGNR templates and without having to go through 50 steps to do it."

Cascade Server does not support this kind of functionality nativly, so the web team had to integrate Cascade Server with other technologies to achieve the desired result. "The slideshow itself--what people see on the screen--is done in Flash," Mark explained. "But the Flash has to know what pictures to display and where to find them. Since Cascade Server and Flash can't really talk to each other, we had to write a ColdFusion program to translate the Cascade Server output into a language that Flash could understand."

While the slide show may be up and ready, Mark isn't finished with the tool just yet. "Since I finished the slide show, I've had a few ideas on how to improve it," he says. "But I've had to move on to higher priority projects. I'm hoping this tool will be popular enough, and and that there will be enough demand to justify an upgrade or two in the future."