Wordpress slideshow plugin with scrollbar, autoplay and lightbox

Question

I have been asked to build a portfolio website for a photographer. The main page contains a slideshow of the photographer's best work, I have used an autoplaying NextGEN SmoothGallery with Lytebox. After some customization of the plugin, this works.

However, the client has requested a category selection above the main slideshow and a scrollbar below the image. They also want part of the previous and next images to be visible, not just the image in focus. The image here illustrates what I mean.

I have searched and searched, but cannot find a plugin that would do this. Can anybody help, please?

Answer 1

The trouble is, I doubt there is a plugin around that would do this, and it's really not going to be a case of "here's the code to do that, just drop it in and you're flying".

If it were me, I'd probably write the whole thing myself, because if I'm honest, I've never used the NextGEN SmoothGallery plugin, and wouldn't want to root around all the code when I've got a simple idea myself;

A bit of PHP that outputs the list of categories, and then an unordered list of the X most recent items, one list for each category.

Then I'd use jQuery (and probably the jCarousel plugin) to create the slideshow for a single list, and add click handlers to the category links which simply 'swap in' the correct list into the current carousel.

Finish the whole thing off with some CSS.

Does any of that sound like something you'd be familiar with?