This practice disappointed me. WordPress.org and its founder Matt have been the promoters of open-source code under the GPL, and stood on the side of openness and transparency. The inclusion of Quantcast script, which collects traffic information and accumulates it on Quantcast databases, with no disclosure to the users both surprised and disappointed me. What was even more disappointing was Matt’s nonchalant response “…turn off the stats plugin? :)” (his smiley)

There is a noticeable slowdown despite Matt’s claim to the contrary, I validated this on several sites I manage and all showed visible performance increase without the WordPress.com Stats plugin. Needless to say, i disabled and deleted the plugin on this site as well as several others. There are quite a few other options that provide the same or even better data. Until WordPress.com and Matt come clean on this issue, I will not use this plugin nor will I recommend it to my clients.

My recommendation to you, the reader, if you use self-hosted WordPress you should test this on your site and then decide based on performance issues as well as ethical dimensions. I learned a lesson, even the most trustworthy appearing organizations and individuals may unexpectedly behave in unexpected ways. Caveat emptor!

On some occasions, especially on sites that I build for others, I want to add a title to the displayed image for added information. This stumped me for a while as there are no check-boxes or other configuration options in either NGG or HS. A little investigation and reading lead me to the solution of adding the following lines to the HighSlide code into the WS-Higslide configuration script:

hs.show_caption=”y”;
hs.captionEval = “this.thumb.title”;  (this will display the contents of the “Title” field in NGG)

or:
hs.captionEval = “this.a.title”;  (this will display the contents of the “Caption” field in NGG)

I hope this helps others who may be trying to do the same.

Note: After trying this technique for a week or so, I have found it to be too fragile when editing the post. At any time, because of an accidental opening in the “Visual” edit mode you may lose a line or two, crippling the Highslide effect. I am abandoning this idea for the time being, experiment at your own risk.

Better yet, try ShadowBox JS Plugin which integrates very smoothly and transparently with all the image and media links. I consider this post deprecated.

I have been trying to get Highslide integrated into WordPress and NextGen Gallery, I think I have figured out how to use a couple of tools together to make this happen. Mind you, I am not a JavaScript programmer, the code makes but little sense to me, especially one as elaborate as Highslide with much flexibility and capability. This post will outline my method of accomplishing the integration, not necessarily the best method. I am not sure if there is a unique method. I would have much preferred to have a little more plugin assistance but I will get anything I can get in this area. I assume you have already installed NextGen Gallery. If not, go get it and install it and learn what to do with that. I am not writing about how to use NGG, but how to integrate Highslide to display the images from the NGG pool.

1. Download WP Highslide and install it just like any other plugin. It will go into your plugins directory and its default directory name is highslide. The actual PHP plugin is a single file that resides inside the highslide directory and there are some other highlside files but not necessarily the version you may need. Visit Highslide site and decide which version you want. Since I was interested in using it to display gallery images and Flash slide shows, I decided to get the “kitchen sink” variety. Who knows, I might decide to use it for other purposes too.
2. As its instructions indicate, also download Highslide from its source. There you have the option of downloading different versions of HS with different set of capabilities.
3. Extracting the contents of the Highslide ZIP file, upload its contents to the plugin directory (also named highslide, no surprise there.)
4. In WordPress, activate WP Highslide which will place a menu item under “Settings” to its control panel. In its control panel, there are some radio-button options that are fairly self explanatory, and a window where you can edit some of the Highslide override parameters. Reading the HS documentation and looking at some samples may help.
5. Now in WordPress dashboard, choose “Gallery” to access NextGen Gallery settings. There you will need to go to “Options/Effects” and from the JavaScript Thumbnail effect drop down list, select Highslide. That’s all I did.
6. At this point, all your NGG images will be displayed using Highslide script with its default settings.
7. To integrate a Flash slide show or another SWF file, you need to actually embed a script into your post in the HTML editor. You cannot do this part in the “Visual” editor. So, when the time comes to enter the code you must click on the HTML tab and paste the code there.
8. Make sure you write everything you want as part of the post, proof read if you like and make it ready for posting except for the necessary code to display the Flash file. When you are ready, click on the HTML tab on top of the editor. Making sure you do not paste the code in the wrong place, go to the very top of the document, press enter to open a blank line and paste it there. Do not switch back to the Visual mode as it may result in your code be trimmed and parts of it to be chopped off.
9. Take the following code and paste it to your post at the point you prepared for it. Make sure to replace the domain and file information as well as the HS overlay dimensions to your needs.<script type=”text/javascript”>// Apply the Highslide settings
   hs.graphicsDir = ‘highslide/graphics/’;
   hs.outlineType = ’rounded-white’;
   hs.wrapperClassName = ‘draggable-header no-footer’;
   hs.allowSizeReduction = false;
   // always use this with flash, else the movie will be stopped on close:
   hs.preserveContent = false;

   // 3) Optionally set the swfOptions.
   // See http://highslide.com/ref/hs.swfOptions for full documentation
   /* hs.swfOptions = {
   version:              “7″,
   expressInstallSwfurl: null,
   flashvars:            {},
   params:               {},
   attributes:           {}
   }; */
   //

   </script>

   // The following style block hides some of the controls I do not want

   <style type=”text/css”>  .highslide-resize, .highslide-footer, .highslide-controls {display: none;} </style>
   // The following block actually presents the link to trigger HS
   // Replace the width and height parameters to fit your SWF file
   // You can actually take this block and place it very carefully elsewhere
   <a onclick=”return hs.htmlExpand(this, { objectType: ‘swf’, width: 700, objectWidth: 700, objectHeight: 500, maincontentText: ‘You need to upgrade your Flash player’  } )” href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/yourshow.swf”>
   Display flash</a>

10. Save your post and preview it. You should see a link like the one below when clicked should trigger Highslide and display your Flash file.

Display flash

Display flash (Does not seem to work with IE7, now (11/18/08) with anything! Why? I have no idea.
Note: As of 12/6/2008 it seems to work with IE7, again, I don’t know why it oscilates between working and not working. One thing is for sure. If you edit your post with this code in it in the Visual edit mode, WordPress deletes some CSS and/or HTML entities, breaking the functionality. If you accidentally enter the Visual edit, switch to HTML edit mode and leave the page without editing or saving. Then come back again, you will find yourself in the HTML edit mode retaining the integrity of the post code. WordPress has to find a fix for this code trimming, it also deletes DIVs for some reason. I need to read up on this.)

I am sure some of you who are better (much better) at JavaScript, PHP, and other matters may find my process cumbersome because you can streamline the process. I sure hope someone takes this idea and turns it into a simple to use plugin; or perhaps expand the functionality of existing ones. For embedding Flash into posts I use Kimili Flash Embed, I even wrote to its author to please add Highslide functionality. All these developers are busy people and doing this work for the love of it, many thanks to you all for your contributions to WordPress world.

If you find easier ways of doing this please let me know. Every time I paste the script and the style components I fear that something would go wrong. So, I saved the above code in a separate post that is not published, that is my backup copy.