MovieCollector Display Widget

Installasjon

Unzip and copy the moviecollector folder to your wordpress /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Using the WordPress Administration panels, activate the MovieCollector Display Widget.

Add the widget to your blog by adding it to a dynamic sidebar (from a widget ready theme) using the Design >> Widgets option on the admin panel.

Configuration

Configuration is fairly straightforward. There are a few odd things however, so its best to read this section fully, or pay special attention to the inline help on the Widget control page.

The configuration options are as follows:

• Widget Title: No magic here. Just the displayed title of the widget.

• Base Filepath: Used to turn the thumbnail file spec embedded in the Movie Collector XML from something like this: E:\Program Files\Collectorz.com\Movie Collector\Data\ Thumbnails\fabd5884547c9e232d60d9d2b441a486.jpg Into a web ready URL, like: http://www.foo.com/movies/Thumbnails/fabd5884547c9e232d60d9d2b441a486.jpg Move Collector embeds the full filespec of each DVD cover image. Unfortunately, this won’t help us put them on your blog. You’ll need to copy your Movie Collector Images and Thumbnail directories to a spot on your webhost where they can be served up via a URL. This configuration option is simply the filespec that your movie images are stored in on your computer. This is only used as a point of reference – the Widget takes this value and strips it out of the returned XML values on runtime. The plugin never directly accesses any file on your PC, nor does it report this value to the public.

• Second Filepath: An optional value that allows you to specify a second file spec where your images may have been stored. Why this value? Well, my collection images were split between two hard drives. Some images were on my D: drive, others were on E:. Since I needed to be able to split up my own collection, this logic was added to the widget as well. 🙂 If all of your images are in the same directory, you can just leave this blank.

• Hosting URL: This is simply the base URL for the web directory where you are storing your movie thumbnail images.

• XML Location: This is the location of the exported XML file. The file location should be relative to your active WordPress theme. Doing so provides swift parsing of the XML file, but comes with that negative point of if you ever change themes, you’ll need to copy the XML file as well.Why didn’t I use a more universal configuration? Well, using an universal absolute file spec is hard because of the nature of webhosting, and I didn’t want to provide a URL, as that would slow down the parsing tremendously (XML would be streamed off of the server, through HTTP and then back to PHP). If I can figure out a better way, I’ll update the Widget.

• Buy Verbage: Allows you to customize the wording of the «buy» link that is below the displayed movie cover.

Additional Configuration (Optional):

There is a CSS file in the «moviecollector» plugin directory with values for changing the style of the Widget title, as well as the Buy link.