Can the 'Ken Burns' effect be added to the rotating header images?
 

I have always like the Ken Burns effect of viewing header images, which zooms in and out of a static picture.
Is there any way this can easily be added to the existing theme header images as they rotate?

There are some threads about using the NextGen Gallery for the header images which allows for a Ken Burns type effect.

Thank you for the information Larry. I shall investigate the Nextgen gallery a bit further.

John

I have now had a look at the Nextgen plugin, but I see that it uses Flash. Flash is bad news as far as I am concerned at the moment. The reason being that rotating images that use Flash do not work properly on IE 64 bit operating systems. Apparently Adobe still haven't brought out a version that works on the IE 64 bit system, even though they have known of the problem since Vista came out.

See http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/6b3af6c9.html for Adobe's explanation.

As 62% of my site visitors use IE I cannot risk using a rotating image plugin that either leaves a blank box or a list of thumbnails in place of rotating photos just because they happen to be using a 64 bit system.

Any other ideas please?

my only other thought would be to try coding a java script to do what you want - if you don't know how to do that, you will have to find a java programmer to help you (I'm not proficient in Java) or search the internet for something existing.

Thanks for the idea juggledad. Just in case you or anybody else is interested I have found a javascript based slideshow called super slideshow. Thats the good news! The bad news is that it hasn't been developed yet for use as a header slideshow. Works for sidebars/posts etc but not headers - all that's missing is a 'theme function feature' whatever that may mean. So its a case of wait a bit longer.

I'm playing around with the SuperSlider-Show plugin along with the Shortcode for Sidebar plugin which allows you to put shortcode in a sidebar. I've added a new widget area in the header area and will see how it goes.

Can you let me know if it works properly please? If it does work would you mind expanding on just what you have done?

Superslider doesn't want to play nice. I will keep you posted.

Hi Larry,

I don't know if you have had a look at the plugin's website at
http://support.wp-superslider.com/forum.php?id=2 but he suggested to somebody else asking a similar question the following:

...it's not so difficult to add a function which you could call from your theme file. How ever, where do the images come from? how do we tell the script which images to use?

Meanwhile, you could add a post loop into your theme head and have it show a specific post. You'll need to look into how to pull a single post in a second post loop or outside of the loop....

I would have thought that the easiest way would be to look for a gallery file created in Wordpress, and this would have a page id to show where the images come from.

I have no idea how to do the scripting and incorporating it with Atahualpa.

What I was trying is a combination of NexGen Gallery which SuperSlider works with and a plugin that allows for shortcodes in a widget. I just haven't had a lot of time to "play"

I quite understand - I am struggling to find the time to finish off the website. Perhaps it would have been better to pay to have it done after all; although then I would miss out on the fun of discovering new plugins.

Have you tried this site? http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex14/index.html

They have a lot of javascript based effects, while not created specifically for Wordpress they are very adaptable and the folks in the forum is very helpful in doing so.

I was able to get a Ken Burns effect working but it was really too busy for a header and went back to fading images.