This is a fun and simple project about creating a news slideshow with ajax & php.
It's a two part project.
**Overview**
Taking an xml feed of news stories [title,image,description,link]
Displaying them similar to:
[login to view URL]
Notice the arrows that let the user go forward and backward.
However it should be much nicer and smother looking, here's and example of the
quality we'd like:
[login to view URL]
**Part 1:**
Doing this with just 1 xml feed url.
**
Part 2:**
Doing this with multiple (1-3) xml feeds picking the articles in random
order.
## Deliverables
**Requirements:**
* Not all the articles (xml nodes) will have images, only the ones with images should appear.
* The links to the images in the xml look like: [login to view URL]~pix/d-sabah-2~[login to view URL]
You will need to replace with 200x200 to 400x400 because the 200 pixle wide images are too small.
eg: the link above would be: [login to view URL]~pix/d-sabah-2~[login to view URL]
* The photos will need to be cropped on the top and bottom
* The total size of the image will be: 400 pixles wide and 245 pixles high
* The titles will appear under the photo in a shaded grey semi transparent box.
* Here is a demo how the end product should look: [login to view URL]
* The article description must appear below the box.
* Some descriptions may have html, you can either strip the html or render the text with the html.
However you cannot actually show the tags.
* This site currently has reference to prototype & script.aculo.us. So the solution will need to use those javascript libraries and nothing else.
**Important Notes**
* The site has php 4 running. If you need php 5 let me know right away so I can install it.
* I'd like all the work to be able to run as an php include so the rest of the source code says clean and minimal
* I'm flexible about how you approach the solution as some things can be done in PHP or Javascript.
* I would recommend setting this up a a cron job that runs every 5 minutes.
* That creates a list of articles and generates the cropped images to a special folder
* * That creates a list of articles and generates the cropped images to a special folder