a (possibly) common slideshowpro mistake…

Hi everyone-
there are a number of support questions in the support forums dealing with slideshowpro issues. though each user probably has a unique situation with his / her / its SSP implementation, perhaps some of you will find this post useful. and please reply to this post if you have questions, additions, or corrections. (The lessons in here were learned through many sleepless nights of frustration:)

first, be sure your rich visual editor is OFF for whatever page or post you are trying to deploy SSP.

second, be sure your paths are relative, not absolute. i don’t know if this approach applies to SSP .swfs housed within subfolders on your server space, but it certainly helps when you house the .swf, .xml, and gallery folder in your root. so:
rather than refer to your movie as http://www.yourdomain.com/slideshow.swf, try just /slideshow.swf.

This way, your movie is assured to play regardless of whether a user types ‘www.yourdomain.com’ or just ‘yourdomain.com’. (of course you can set up .htaccess files or other redirect methods to achieve the same effect but if you’re like me (code dummy) then screw that!

third, write your post. there are many ways to get ssp to work in a page or post, here are just a few:

Quick and Easy (and probably dirty):
simply call an object in a page or a post. I do not know whether this method is standards compliant, but sure enough it works flawlessly, and it seems to be a path of little resistance.

so for this method, an ssp entry on a page or a post could look like this:
<object width="xxx" height="xxx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="/slideshow.swf"> </object>.
That’s it for that method! it seems to work across browsers and across platforms for the site’s i’ve used it on (so far anyway 😉

BUT if you want to go the extra mile: the kml_flashembed plugin works beautifully and is, from my limited understanding, a fully standards compliant approach.

for this approach, install the kml_flashembed plugin, activate it, then write your page or post entry (again be sure your visual editor is OFF). One way of getting ssp to work through this method is to write your code in the following form:
[kml_flashembed movie="/slideshow.swf" height="xxx" width="xxx" fvars="xmlDataPath = /images.xml" /].

but be sure to name your files as you’ve named them for ssp, both the final files and within your ssp .fla.

And finally, once you’ve published your page or post, and you go to view your site, it’s best to clear the dang browser cache. it seems like sometimes the page will recognize changes but in some cases it’ll show what the page was last time you visited… i’m not sure how to clear the cache in internet exploder but in good ol’ firefox it’s just “Shift+F5”.

Hope this helps someone- please feel free to ask questions or make contributions / clarifications in this post.

thanks all, happy wordpressing!