This isn’t going to be long but I just wanted to say I redesigned the site, yet again. The last one was just temporary with a free theme. Now I have a premium theme named Pro and I spent a little more time on it. You can pick the theme up yourself if you like it from here. Has tons of goodies and an awesome page builder. Lots of amazing plugins included and a really nice header and footer builder. So many things I could go on and on but go check it out for yourself.
I’ve been working on MDS 3.0 some more and I’ve just finished implementing something really neat I wanted to share. I was thinking of ways I could implement this myself but figured there must be something out there that can do it already. And lo and behold there is! OpenSeadragon with Zoomify. I’ve already implemented it and now just have to wire up some options for customizing the grid a little more.
It’s unfortunately still limited by memory in the initial creation of the grid though. I’ll definitely have to see if I can process it in smaller blocks at a time that the server can handle. Once the main image is built then Zoomify chops it up into tiles of various zoom levels and whatnot. Then when you load the grid on the site it uses OpenSeadragon to view it and it can zoom in and out and pan around. It can even go full screen and has a little navigator frame you can drag around to move the image too. It’s awesome! And it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. It uses HTML5 and some JavaScript.
Someone somewhat recently showed me a similar sort of site where you could pan and zoom around. I don’t know what that site was using but I do know that OpenSeadragon is highly customizable and I plan to add a whole lot of options for controlling it into the WP admin screen when editing a grid.
Then I’ll finish polishing off the WooCommerce integration and add a way to make the images people upload show up on the grid and be able to click them to go to links and possibly display hover boxes like the old version of MDS does. I’m not completely sure how to go about that just yet with OpenSeadragon but I’m sure there’s a way somehow or another or else I’ll just have to make one.
I’d kind of like to make a video or some screenshots but it’s not all that exciting to look at yet. So just go to the OpenSeadragon link and you’ll see a zoomable image. Now imagine that but having a blank MDS grid in it and that’s pretty much what you’d see if I made a video or a screenshot right now. The one on their site’s nicer to look at.
Alright. Feel free to comment or send me a message on Discord or email letting me know what you think. I’m off to eat some baked oatmeal for breakfast.