Panoramas using WordPress

[Hugh]

I was wondering if anyone is using WordPress to publish interactive panoramas, and if so, which Plugins they would recommended.

I have tried PanoPress (www.panopress.org) but am having difficulty in getting it to work satisfactorily, so I am currently using SwfObj by Matt Carpenter.
This gives a good result, but does not appear to support hot-spots to other panoramas.

Any suggestions would be welcome .

Thanks, Hugh.

[Vincèn]

What problem did you encounter ? I use it with a lot of success on my own wp blog (http://www.skivr.com). Did you try to post in Panopress forum ? Sam is always fast and helpful for problems ;)

[badders]

Hi Hugh

Panopress is the way to go and Sam's the man!

[Hugh]

Thanks Vincen and Andrew,

As you both recommend PanoPress I'll persevere and take Vincen's advice to post on the PanoPress forum.
I guess I was looking for an endorsement as this is the Plugin to use as my experiments with it show that it does giving a more pleasing result.

Seeing your site Vincen convinces me that my problem is "user error" as I have not been able to work out how I can have a thumbnail that opens up the panorama when clicked in the same way as the Lightbox Plugin works, although I have ploughed through the PanoPress forum and found some related articles..
By the way I enjoy visiting your site from time to time as I was in Les Gets a year ago and very much enjoyed the area.

Best regards, Hugh.

[Vincèn]

As you both recommend PanoPress I'll persevere and take Vincen's advice to post on the PanoPress forum.
I guess I was looking for an endorsement as this is the Plugin to use as my experiments with it show that it does giving a more pleasing result.

yep it's pretty nice and now it includes some little arrows at bottom so you can pass from a pano to an other one directly without closing the popup and going back to the blog

Seeing your site Vincen convinces me that my problem is "user error" as I have not been able to work out how I can have a thumbnail that opens up the panorama when clicked in the same way as the Lightbox Plugin works, although I have ploughed through the PanoPress forum and found some related articles..

it's just a thumbnail of pano you put in same directory as all tiles and you indicate it in post code so he knows where to find it ;)

[pano file="http://www.skivr.com/wp-content/plugins/panopress/xml/France/Isere/7_Laux/Pincerie_depart/pano.xml" preview="http://visites.skivr.com/panoramas/France/Isere/7_Laux/Pincerie_depart/preview-carre.jpg" width="500" height="250"]

and it supports to get xml and swf on a different host of the tiles itself I host xml on same host as my blog, but all tiles (which means a lot of storage and high speed needed for quick load of panos) is hosted on a CDN on Amazon S3 !

By the way I enjoy visiting your site from time to time as I was in Les Gets a year ago and very much enjoyed the area.

Thanks looks like you love snow panos

Vincèn

[Hugh]

Thanks for the advice Vincen,

I'll have another go in the near future.
I guess my real problem is I am finding WordPress quite a steep learning curve although I know it is supposedly easier to use.
I having been using Frontpage for many years for www.hugha.co.uk and switching from steam driven software to the modern age with WordPress for www.360hugh.co.uk is proving challenging.
(Did someone mention something about teaching old dogs new tricks? )

Yes, I do like your snow panoramas.
Unfortunately traveling to all the beautiful parts of the world is not practical, but I think interactive panoramas of such places is the next best thing and possibly a catalyst to actually getting there, or a nice reminder of a previous visit.
I know that Dennis's panoramas of Yosemite make me wish to visit for real some day and I am sure I will visit your region again.

Best regards, Hugh.

[Sam Rohn]

Hi Hugh

Panopress is the way to go and Sam's the man!

yep it's pretty nice and now it includes some little arrows at bottom so you can pass from a pano to an other one directly without closing the popup and going back to the blog
<snip>

[pano file="http://www.skivr.com/wp-content/plugins/panopress/xml/France/Isere/7_Laux/Pincerie_depart/pano.xml" preview="http://visites.skivr.com/panoramas/France/Isere/7_Laux/Pincerie_depart/preview-carre.jpg" width="500" height="250"]

Vincèn

thanks guys :)

Omer Calev deserves some credit here too, as he has basically written all of the code for panopress at this point :)

Vincèn, you probably want to store your panoramas & xml outside of the plugins folder, this folder (and other plugin folders) can be over written by future updates, especially once we move panopress to the wordpress plugin repository & updates will be handled by the wp admin

better to store oyur panorama files in wp-content/uploads or create wp-content/panoramas etc

hugh, wp is easy to learn, unlearning how confusing older methods of maintaining a website are can be the hard part, there are many many wp tutorials online on just bout any subject, just google "beginning wordpress tutorial" etc & also check youtube for more

thanks again :)

sam

[Vincèn]

thanks guys :)

Hey Sam,

Thanks for jumping in

Vincèn, you probably want to store your panoramas & xml outside of the plugins folder, this folder (and other plugin folders) can be over written by future updates, especially once we move panopress to the wordpress plugin repository & updates will be handled by the wp admin

Thanks for the info Sam, so I know now that I should not update my plugin ! Why do you want to remove that feature ? it's a shame as it's so useful, it allows to store all panorama contents on a CDN to get quick speed loading and low charges for storing these big size contents

hugh, wp is easy to learn, unlearning how confusing older methods of maintaining a website are can be the hard part, there are many many wp tutorials online on just bout any subject, just google "beginning wordpress tutorial" etc & also check youtube for more

and don't forget not to add too many plugins in wp, it can be quickly a source of issues with some poor coded plugins, keep it at strict minimum and check comments on wp website before installing any plugin and check it's compatible with your version of wp, it'll save you lot of pain

Vincèn

[Sam Rohn]

Hey Sam,

Thanks for the info Sam, so I know now that I should not update my plugin ! Why do you want to remove that feature ? it's a shame as it's so useful, it allows to store all panorama contents on a CDN to get quick speed loading and low charges for storing these big size contents


Vincèn

nothing is being removed from panopress, you can store your panos anywhere you want but it is standard practice with wordpress to assume that all files in wp-content/plugins can be overwritten automatically by the wordpress plugin update mechanism, so no media files should ever be kept in plugins folder as they could then be accidentally deleted when a plugin is updated, so in general, the plugins folder is something you want to leave alone unless you are messing around w plugin code :)

media files like images or panoramas or xml or whatever uploaded by users should be kept in a safer location that cannot be overwritten by wordpress, like the wp-content/uploads folder, but anywhere in wp-content/ outside of plugins or themes is safe and will not be overwritten by wp automatic update mechanism

and panopress will have some cool updates coming soon that you will probably want to use :)

if you want to move your panos at from one path to another, fixing the paths in your old posts is easy, just use a wordpress search and replace plugin like this - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/

sam

[Hugh]

Hello Sam,

Thank you for your input.

Yes, I recognise that you and Omer have done a great job and I really need to get my head around the subject, but as you say "unlearning how confusing older methods of maintaining a website are can be the hard part".
This is so true in my case.

I guess this is progress, but many old skills go by the wayside with technology - I have rebuilt car engines and gearboxes as a young man, but with modern cars I would not know where to start!

I am going through the tutorials and slowly getting there, but I will probably need to go on to your forum for advice at some stage.

Best regards, Hugh.

[Sam Rohn]

as Vincèn said, keep it simple, you will probably want to turn off or ignore 90% of wordpress built in features 1st thing and install a few (not too many) plugins to add some non standard features, find a nice theme and boom, there's your site

you just need to get your head around a few things like the difference between pages and posts, how a dynamic database driven site like wordpress works compared to a static directory based site, just build a test site and read and re-read the tutorials and it will sink in :)

for me the very best thing about wordpress is the excellent backend admin, it is the easiest way i know to build and maintain & update a website

and old skills will come in handy here too, wordpress themes are all html & css with a bit of php, so fixing up your own custom theme is not too tough for anyone who is not afraid of a text editor

but then, panopress is easy, just add your pano to a wordpress post or page like [pano file="path/mypano.swf" preview="path/mypano.jpg"] after uploading your files to the appropriate location, let us know if you have any problems...

thanks

sam

[Hugh]

Thanks Sam,

What I have done so far with WordPress is on www.360hugh.co.uk.

I use the Lightbox plugin for the images and will soon (hopefully) be using PanoPress for the panoramas, but need to find time to sit down and concentrate and get my head round all the information both from here and trolling through your forum.

Best regards, Hugh.

[Hugh]

Hello Sam,

Perhaps this is not the right place to do this and I should move this thread over to your PanoPress forum, but I am clearly doing something wrong (perhaps stupid ).

I have Deactivated the "SwfObj" plugin and have "PanoPress" Active.
The other plugins I have Active are "Lightbox 2" for the image galleries and "WP Super Cache".
Could it be that one or both of these are causing a conflict?

I use the "Upload/Import" ("Add Media") to upload the relevant files to the server and I know they are there because if I type in the URLs they are found.

So, taking a lead from Vincen's comment I have tried inserting:
[pano file="http://360hugh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The-Earth-House.swf" preview="http://360hugh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ATC-Earth-House.jpg" width="940" height="200"]
onto the page, but when I "Update" and "View Page" I get a message:
"Error
Please enter file name or URL"
but if I just enter the URLs the Jpeg and SWF are there!

I feel that I am close because if I just paste in Vincen's code into my page:
[pano file="http://www.skivr.com/wp-content/plugins/panopress/xml/France/Isere/7_Laux/Pincerie_depart/pano.xml" preview="http://visites.skivr.com/panoramas/France/Isere/7_Laux/Pincerie_depart/preview-carre.jpg" width="500" height="250"]
I get his beautiful snow scene on my page, so the path is working.
Sorry Vincen, but at least I found something that worked!
So if my URLs are correct, which I believe them to be because they work on their own, then why doesn't it work.

If I swap the lines over to:
[preview="http://360hugh.co.uk/panormas/corporate-hospitality-tours/panorama-test/ScanWorld1-Letterbox.png" width="800" height="200" pano file="http://360hugh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ScanWorld1.swf"]
then this text is displayed on the published page and clicking the the URLs takes me the image or the flash.


Another thing that is baffling me is that if I use the "Upload/Import" option to go the "Gallery" and select "Show" for the SWF file and then "Embed in post" I get the text (e.g):
[pano file="http://360hugh.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ScanWorld1.swf"]
on my edit page, but when I click "Update" it simply vanishes, but if I paste this same text in from a text editor or Word and click "Update" and "View Page" I get a box with a little Red Cross (OK, I have not added the preview= part) and clicking this does show the pano, but I cannot scroll down to get it all displayed.
If I then add the "preview= line" I get a message that the page cannot be found, but if I then remove the "pano file=" the page is found!

I am going round in circles, but they are not converging on a solution.

Could it be the template I am using (Weaver 2.2.6 by Bruce Wampler) is the problem?

I have had grey hair for a long time, but I am finding this quite frustrating and would welcome any hints .

Best regards, Hugh.

[Hugh]

I am getting there !


It seems that the way to get things working is to Copy a "working text" into Word where I can edit the path and file names then Paste the new "text" in the new page.


All I have to do now is work out how to get an image on the page instead of box with a cross in it or even better for the pano to start without needing to click the box.


Perseverance the key !


Thanks for all the tips so far.

[Vincèn]

It seems that the way to get things working is to Copy a "working text" into Word where I can edit the path and file names then Paste the new "text" in the new page.
All I have to do now is work out how to get an image on the page instead of box with a cross in it or even better for the pano to start without needing to click the box.

Be careful to use the HTML editor when you edit a post and not the formatted tab as it messes HTML codes and stuffs like that ! Url of your post to check what's wrong ?

Vincèn