I was tasked a few months ago to rotate an image on a site randomly. Ordinarily this would not be an issue but the image was a css background image and I really didn’t have the ambition to rewrite the css and page html to do this. Thankfully my laziness paid off, because I found a solution while looking through some php code for wordpress.
I ran into this template that I liked, but wanted to change the header image. I changed it, uploaded it and refreshed the page, but NOTHING changed. I spent a good 5 minutes on this before checking the css to see what was going on. Instead of finding a path to an image in the css for the background, I found a path to a file named rotate.php. The script was written by Matt Mullenweg (http://photomatt.net/scripts/randomimage) and seemed simple enough to me. What I liked about this script is that it didn’t require managing a bunch of images. If you want an image you simply stick it in a predefined directory and point to that directory.
I decided to rewrite this in coldfusion and within a few minutes I had a working. It is rather simple. Define your folder, define your extensions and define the url path to the folder and you are done. You will find the code below.
<cftry>
<!---
created by Andrew Alba >> http://www.albawebstudio.com
This will grab images from specified folder and randomly display them
You will only need to modify the three variables below
--->
<!--- Insert the absolute path (with trailing slash) to the images.
"/home/mysite/public_html/images/" or "/www/mysite/web/images/random/"
If the images are in the same directory as
this script you can leave it as shown file
--->
<cfset folder = "#GetDirectoryFromPath(GetBaseTemplatePath())#">
<!--- List of allowed extensions (separate with space) --->
<cfset ext = "jpg jpeg png gif">
<!--- Insert the URL to the folder that contains the images --->
<cfset url_image_path = "http://www.homeshq.com/gfx/promotion/">
<!--- do not edit below this point --->
<!--- lets get the contents of the folder --->
<cfdirectory directory="#folder#" action="list" name="filelisting">
<!--- pull just file names out of the list --->
<cfset fileList = "">
<cfoutput query="filelisting">
<cfif filelisting.type is "file">
<cfset fileList = listappend(fileList,filelisting.name)>
</cfif>
</cfoutput>
<!--- now we can create a new list of files --->
<cfset new_fileList = "">
<cfloop list="#fileList#" index="i" delimiters=",">
<!--- lets use our list of extensions to
weed out the files types we don't want --->
<!--- now we grab just the extension --->
<cfset file_ext = listlast(i,".")>
<!--- if it finds file_ext is acceptable as per
ext then it adds it to the array --->
<cfif listfindnocase(ext,file_ext," ")>
<cfset new_fileList = listappend(new_fileList,i)>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<!--- now to choose random number from the list --->
<cfset image_file =
listgetat(new_fileList,randrange(1,listlen(new_fileList),"SHA1PRNG"),",")>
<cflocation
url="#url_image_path##image_file#?rand=#randrange(1,999999999,"SHA1PRNG")#"
addtoken="no">
<cfcatch type="any"></cfcatch>
</cftry>
Hey Andrew,
That’s a very nice script – just what I was looking for this morning. Apparently, I suck at Flash programming and your script came as the savior. Just one question though:
Since my code resides on two machines – my own computer where all the code is developed and the server where the website is actually hosted, would it not be easier to set the variable folder using a relative path rather than an absolute path??
I tried using a relative path for that variable and it doesn’t seem to work. What am I missing here??
Thanks in advance!
Had to check the ColdFusion documentation before I responded but the documentation confirmed what I thought. You need to use the absolute path for the CFDirectory tag.
That said, I might have a possible solution for you. I was using two different operating systems for my developement and host. I kept a variable in the Application.cfm that defined the absolute path to the web root. I had one application file for the development environment and one for the live environment. The development.Application.cfm file had <cfset basePath = “/var/www/html” /> while the live.Application.cfm had <cfset basePath = “/home/mySite/public_html” />
Using this basePath variable you can save your absolute path using something like this:
<cfset folder = “#basePath#/path/to/my/images/” />
<cfdirectory directory=”#folder#” action=”list” name=”filelisting” />
Hope that works for you.