You're welcome, I'm glad it has come in handy for you!
That sounds like a fun project, there is a WordPress related web comic that uses a slideshow, but it's a strip with just a few slides in each episode: http://www.webboycomic.co.uk/comic/web-comic/go-akismet
By default, the slides are going to be sorted by the publish date in reverse chronological order just like a blog, so the latest slide post will be first. You probably want this in regular chronological order so that you can publish page 1 first, page 2 second, etc so that when you publish the latest page, it is last and the slides can be read as a regular book, is that correct?
To do this you would need to use a custom slideshow template, with just one simple update to the parameters for the slideshow query. You just need to take this array:
$loop = new WP_Query( array(
'post_type' => 'slide',
'slideshow' => $slideshow,
'posts_per_page' => $options['slideshow_quantity']
) ); ?>
And add a parameter for the order to switch it from descending to ascending:
$loop = new WP_Query( array(
'post_type' => 'slide',
'slideshow' => $slideshow,
'order' => 'ASC',
'posts_per_page' => $options['slideshow_quantity']
) ); ?>
Now the oldest slide will be first and the newest last, so the slides just need to be published in the order you want them read in.
Getting the slideshow to start on the latest slide dynamically is a little trickier. You need to customize the slideshow template a bit more. First you need to get the post count to get the number of slides in the loop and use that number in the metadata for the starting slide so that it will start on the last slide regardless of the number of slides.
Try replacing lines 29-63 of the unedited slideshow template:
<div id="meteor-slideshow<?php echo $slideshow; ?>" class="meteor-slides <?php
...
?>">
With this edited version:
<div id="meteor-slideshow<?php echo $slideshow; ?>" class="meteor-slides <?php echo $slideshow . ' ' . $meteornav . ' { ';
if ( !empty( $slideshow ) ) { echo "next: '#meteor-next" . $slideshow . "', prev: '#meteor-prev" . $slideshow . "', pager: '#meteor-buttons" . $slideshow . "', "; }
$latest_slide = $loop->post_count -1;
echo 'startingSlide:' . $latest_slide;
if ( !empty( $metadata ) ) { echo ', ' . $metadata; }
echo ' }'; ?>">
That should get the slideshow setup how you want it, but 72 slides will be pushing it! Really depends on the size of the slides though, if they are a single panel with a lot of compression you might be fine, but if each slide is a fairly large page of a graphic novel, you might have some problems. The slideshow should still run, but if the slide images are each 200k, that would be nearly 15 megs, which would be a lot to load.
You could try loading the images dynamically, jQuery Cycle should support that, but it would take some customizations. Your other option would be to break it up into chapters.
Pudding4ever
