A Flickr photo widget for your blog. Specify the photo tag id and the API Key, it randomly selects one photo from Flickr with that tag, and displays i
Will this plugin cycle through photos, like a slideshow?
No. It grabs a list of photos from Flickr, based on search terms you provide, and then selects one of those photos on the rendered page. It does not cycle through photos.
If you refresh the page, it will randomly select a photo again. It will probably be a different photo, but not always.
Where do I get an API Key?
To get an API Key, you need to visit
http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/apply/
Walk through the steps.
Copy and paste the API Key to the appropriate place in the Widget
configuration menu. You don’t need the secret.
Why do I need an API Key?
You need an API key from Yahoo so that the requests that your wordpress
page sends to Yahoo, will be tracked and allowed. Every time the
page loads, it sends out a request to Yahoo, and gets a list of
photos. Yahoo wants to know who’s asking for this information, and
the API key lets them track that.
Will I be charged by Yahoo for the requests?
No. The API key is free to get; I don’t speak for Yahoo, but it seems
to me they use the key only for tracking purposes.
Yahoo may throttle the level of requests if you use this plugin on a
heavily loaded site. In that case you may need to use OAuth2.0, which I
have not yet built into the plugin. But I could be convinced, for the
right price. 😉
Can I set the visual style of the widget from the admin backend?
No, I haven’t built that capability into this simple plugin, just yet.
Let me know if you have strong requirements in this area.
Does the plugin use caching?
Yes, the plugin will cache results for each search term. The responses from Flickr can be 15-20k. The response won’t change from one page view to the next, so caching makes sense.
The search response cache is keyed on the search term. If your picture term is “pizza|beer”, there will be two distinct cache files maintained.
You can configure the lifetime of items in the cache, via the configuration panels in the wordpress backend.