FolderblogCategoryIndex

Today i managed to write a FolderblogCategoryIndex -page.
its displaying a thumbnail for each of your categories (you defined in categories.txt see the wiki entry CreatingCategories ) and automatically generates the links to the category pages (menu-overview, the latest image or the first of a category. what you like).
The thumbnail is using your category-name as thumbnail-description. All necessary data is included from folderblog-files so you can see it as extension to your existing folderblog-installation and should work with every folderblog installation. As little gimmick it shows how many photos or images you have online and how many are in each category.
(see it in action here)

the idea

when using folderblog in a gallery like way, where you sort images by putting them into categorys, you might want to have a place start... thats what this is for!...
to get it to work, only thing you'll have to do is: upload my category_index.php to your folderblog-directory and upload thumbnails in the same directory with the name of the category-folder. (it is necessary to keep these thumbs anywhere outside your photos-directory cause they'd be counted then...)
So whenever you add a new category to folderblog, this category-index shows the appropriate thumb and link (just create a thumb for it).
I hope its useful to everyone whos using folderblog in a gallery-like-way (with categories - like i do)

What it can't do...

• as it is just an addon to folderblog it doesnt care of your styles given in template_settings and vars (like thumbs per row or max_thumbwidth, ...)


• when you dont have categories, no thumb is displayed, of course

so there's no sense in using this Category-Index when you have no categories. Anything clear so far?
What it can do...

• it offers visitors the possibility to quickly see what image-categorys you have


• you could use one of your already created thumbnails, as well as an image rotator that would display a random thumbnail on the Category-Index.


• image and caption text link directly to the last/first (according to your image-sorting-setting) image of that category.


• alternatively you could lead someone who 'clicks/selects' a category to the menu-page (the thumbnail overview of a category)


• as the thumbnail used by default, has to be in the same directory as the folderblog.php, you could also use a slightly bigger thumb for this category-index if you want (you'll normally choose your best picture of that category :-) ...

download is here (its called view source)
you can contact me (erik) via the WikiCredits if you have any questions...