Update: the Toque Tambor website has recently been redesigned by a different developer, so the links below no longer work.

I have recently been working on an update for a previous client, Toque Tambor. Their “web person” (every band or community has one) was keen to integrate Youtube and Flickr into their website. I had previously installed both a video and a photo gallery on their site www.toquetambor.com but he was finding it hard to update and couldn’t afford to pay for my services every time one of their gigs was filmed or photographed.

Because they have quite a following on both Youtube and Flickr and the guy is quite used to uploading content there, I suggested synchronising the new galleries with their existing Flickr and Youtube accounts. This would allow him to upload new content in the familiar way – which is especially good for the videos, since Youtube accepts uploads in many different formats and resolutions and converts them for you. The new stuff would then “magically” appear on their own website’s galleries.

I knew this was possible through WordPress using the Tubepress and Flick Photo Album plugins, though I’d never actually set it up before. It was fairly straightforward, the only problem being that I had to change the WordPress default configuration to make sure the pages matched the rest of the Toque Tambor website – simply editing an existing WordPress template would not have given an acceptable result.

I basically stripped the classic WordPress template of most elements: menus, sidebar, breadcrumbs etc. and only kept the code for the main content. I then pasted this into a copy of one of the original HTML pages (in the right place), making all relative links (including stylesheet and image sources) absolute. I named this file index.php and overwrote the template’s original index.php file.

Then it was just a question of working on the plugins’ stylesheets to match the original design of the website. The result can be seen here: photos and videos.

Email me if you need more specific details on the various steps, it’s really quite simple and it means you can pick any useful functionality built into WordPress and embed it into your HTML pages, as long as you have access to a MySQL database. Not being a PHP programmer myself, I’m used to integrating tried and tested open source applications into my websites, and WordPress does a lot of things very well, though sites entirely based on WordPress are often pretty dull and can be spotted a mile away.