Use php to read xml file and generate alt content for swfobject

bagpuss03

Hi,

I use SlideShowPro. It reads an xml file to dynamically update the flash photo gallery with images and their titles and captions.

For the purposes of SEO, I would like to show a simple list of albums, image titles and captions in the alternative content. Now I could just write this in by hand, but since the whole point of having the xml is to save time when updating the image gallery, it would be good to use a php script to pull this information from the xml file for me. The search engines would also read the resulting content.

Anyway , the xml is like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gallery>
<album id="chairs" title="Chairs" lgPath="gallery/chairs/lg/"
tnPath="gallery/chairs/tn/">
<img src="01.jpg" title="First Photo Title" caption="This where my photo caption would be&lt;br /&gt;and sometimes I would include a line break" />
<img src="02.jpg" title="Second Photo Title"  caption="This where your photo caption would be" />
</album>
<album id="tables" title="Tables" lgPath="gallery/tables/lg/"
tnPath="gallery/tables/tn/">
<img src="03.jpg" title="First Table Photo Title"  caption="This where your photo caption would be" />
</album>
</gallery>

I would like to display this info in the alternate content section of the html for swfobject as:

<h2>Chairs</h2>
<ul>
<li>First Photo Title: This is where my caption would be<br />
and sometimes I would include a line break</li>
<li>Second Photo Title: This is where your caption would be</li>
</ul>
<h2>Tables</h2> 
<ul>
<li>First Table Photo Title: This is where your caption would be</li>
</ul>

etc.....

Any ideas how I could use PHP to get from a to b?

Thanks in advance.

Krik

$xml = simplexml_load_file('myxmlfile.php');

foreach ($xml->children() as $album) {
    echo '<h2>'.$album[title].'</h2>';
    echo '<ul>';

foreach ($album->children() as $image) {
    echo '<li>'.$image[title].': '.$image[caption].'</li>';
}
echo '</ul>';
}

As a note that is almost an exact copy of what can be found at php.net under "simple xml children".

bagpuss03

Hmm, could you humour me a little more by explaining how I go about getting that to work?

Krik

I guess I am not sure what you need explained in more detail.

I see the possibility of a couple different things you may need more info on and each is not a small post.

If you could elaborate a bit more it would help in the response.

bagpuss03

Hi,

I was just about to explain more when I realised I hadn't updated the htaccess file on my local test server so that I can run php from within html. Silly me!

All works fine now - thank you!!