Scooch Gallery and Slide Show Builder Demo

Get Scooch'in!

Mon 27th March 2006. Update: Scooch v1 is now ready for download. See the updated article or go straight to the re-launched Scooch web site.

After heaps of blood, sweat and fingertip chaffing the Scooch demo is available for everyone to try. Without exagerating I confess that I've worn out the 'a' key on my keyboard and Paul broke a nail but it was all worth it.

The Scooch microsite is a fully featured working demo with four example slide shows,  and you can create your own to test it out. There's also an RSS feed if you want to be notified what others upload as test shows in the future.

Unobtrusive Javascript, Semantic XHTML, CSS, Accessibility and all that Standards Goodness

Scooch has three-tier accessibility built-in. Firstly, each slide show has been lovingly crafted in semantic and valid XHTML 1.0 Strict with all the individual slide titles, images and descriptions present within the document. The document order is deliberately logical: Slide show meta information comes first followed by slide show controls then individual slide content. Slide admin access and the site menu come last. Great for acessibility, usability and Search Engine Optimisation. Secondly, the slide show functionality is powered by server-side PHP but that only kicks in to action if the third and final tier is not supported. The third tier features rich Javascript controls to manipulate the DOM and provide features like a thumbnails menu, previous and next buttons and an autoplay facility.

Simple Admin with a Free Favicon

Creating a slide show takes three easy steps. Firstly add meta information like a slide show title and description, Rel-tags (keywords) and create a password. Next create the slides: Upload an image with a width you can define, add an image description (alt text) a slide title and slide description. Finally when you publish the new slide show an RSS feed is automatically created, a favicon is automtically created for the page and the slide show meta information is automatically included in the page meta tags.

To edit a slide show you simply insert the password and return to the same three steps to add, edit or delete information.

No Database and No Cookies

Scooch creates the slide shows as physical files on the server so no back-end database is needed. Server-side sessions are used instead of cookies when a slide show is being created which we feel is entirely appropriate until chocolate hobnobs can be delivered via HTTP.

Work In Progress

The full features list for Scooch is available on the microsite but please feel free to try out Scooch and let us know what you think. It is still a demo version so all feedback will be appreciated.

More articles