Display a gallery as a slideshow

[ericlewis]

To build on the improvements to the WordPress Media manager, it would be great to have an option built-in to output a gallery as a slideshow.

[helen]

Why a slideshow?

[toscho]

Isn’t that plugin territory? You can filter the gallery output already or hijack the shortcode.

[ericlewis]

Replying to helen:

Why a slideshow?

The current gallery shortcode implementation works fine, however a gallery with numerous images starts to break up the flow of a post on the front-end.

Replying to toscho:

Isn't that plugin territory?

It could always be plugin territory. But since the 3.5 media changes, there's a UI for creating multiple galleries within a post. Users don't have to make galleries separate from the post editing experience, which is what most gallery/slideshow plugins have been making up for. Since that's not an issue now, adding support for a slideshow in core would fit well in the UI.

[helen]

Are you asking for an option or to add slideshows to core? Because in the latter case, I think that would be a no, and in the former, that doesn't make any sense because core doesn't have different output.

[markoheijnen]

Seems plugin territory to me too. Not sure what you want to see as a slideshow. Just output and let the theme fix it?

If you mean as in a jQuery slideshow, I don't see a way how to make this backwards compatible in a good way. Another thing is that WordPress shouldn't force in using a certain slideshow, specially when there are a lot of them.

[nacin]

I think it would be great (tentatively speaking) if core had some sort of basically slideshow functionality. But I'm not sure if they'd be a new type of gallery, or something that could be chosen as part of the "Link To" gallery ("Popup" rather than "Attachment Page" or "Media File", for example), or a global setting for all galleries.

[Stagger Lee]

I vote for this.

As optional check, for them who want slideshow instead of standard gallery.
Believe me, I tested all plugins (and many themes with inbuild function) for highjacking shortcode for slideshow. You always, always see for breaf time first standard gallery layout, then it becomes slideshow. Translated it means, you simply cannnot use them for anything serious, even with heavy caching.

Think core would manage it better.

PS: Have slight feeling whole media management in WP core is a bit old philosophy. It is from old days when media management was not sufficient, and used only for few images per post. Now when you made something extraordinary of media in core let it lift to whole new level, it can.

Gallery shortcode is one example. Few images, looks nice any time. Mass of images, makes post/page unnecessary to long in height.

[helen]

I am not very excited about the prospect of adopting a third-party slideshow JS library (and no, I don't think we should write our own) or what theme compat looks like.

[ericlewis]

Doesn't sound like this is going to happen. Maybe if HTML spec adopts a <slideshow>.