Store Snapshot created via wordpress to use with lightbox

Question

i know this is a bit of a weird question but its a real time saver
so if you got any ideas (even partial) i would really apreacate them :)

Ok... so i am using wordpress built in interface to capture and disply
remote website images... here is the shortcode i am using..

/*********************************************************************
** SNAPSHOTS
*********************************************************************/
function wpr_snap($atts, $content = null) {
        extract(shortcode_atts(array(
            "snap" => 'http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/',
            "url" => 'http://www.sagive.co.il',
            "alt" => 'My image',
            "w" => '400', // width
            "h" => '300' // height
        ), $atts));

    $img = '<img src="' . $snap . '' . urlencode($url) . '?w=' . $w . '&h=' . $h . '" alt="' . $alt . '"/>';
        return $img;
}

add_shortcode("snap", "wpr_snap");

(How to use this: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/38293/7990) .

thats easy no problem.. but - what if i want to integrate it with lightbox.. since its not an image hosted on my website is ther any way to access that images or even write somthing that would upload the image and make it the feautred image of that specific post (a strech i know) or maybe store it elsewhere somehow? (without a plugin)..

to try and grab the image i have made a second shortcode that does the same snapshot but doesnt wrap inside image tag for the href with the lightbox class..
.

this is the line in the theme:

<a class="lightImages" href="<?php echo do_shortcode('[snapurl url="http://www.sagive.co.il"]'); ?>"><?php echo do_shortcode('[snap url="http://www.sagive.co.il" w="175px" h="125px" alt="'.get_the_title().'"]'); ?></a>

.
any ideas?

Answer 1

---

EDITED ANSWER

Forget every thing i said before. Here is what i have found the following

1. In php to generate a website thumbnail, you cant do it natively with php's built in functions, so you have to call an external service or program to do it for you. Since wordpress is basically php , this fact still holds true. You can see for yourself other coders struggling to do so here :) . I believe that at the url http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/ there exists such a service.

2. To use the service above eg to get a snapshot of google.com

   http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F?w=300px&h=200px
   Note that the url has to be properly encoded thats why you see funny characters in the url

Now light box.

1. Is a javascript script that allows you to have cool picture effects and is easy to use. The implementation i decided to use is a wordpress plugin called Lightbox Plus which depends on colorbox (just another variant of lightbox)
2. Colorbox tries to do some kind of automatic automatic photo detection which may fail in a case like ours where we reference php files instead of direct images or so i think :) See this question on stackoverflow. For my case the problem is because colorbox has code like this somewhere

var defaults = { photo: false; }

Solution Change the false to true :)
Details

1. Download colorbox
2. Get the file jquery.colorbox.js and copy it to the plugin js folder right next to jquery.colorbox-min.js
3. Edit jquery.colorbox.js by changing photo:false to true
4. Tell our plugin to use the modified file. by modifying lightbox-plus\classes\actions.class.php and replace all references to jquery.colorbox-min.js with jquery.colorbox.js

Fix your shortcode. Here is the one iam currently using BUT it only generates images of my schools website

function wpr_snap($atts, $content = null) {
        extract(shortcode_atts(array(
            "snap" => 'http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/',
            "url" => 'http://www.sagive.co.il',
            "alt" => 'My image',
            "w" => '400', // width
            "h" => '300' // height
        ), $atts));

    $img = '<a rel="lightbox[roadtrip]" href="http://s.wordpress.com/mshots/v1/http%3A%2F%2Fchs.mak.ac.ug%2F?w=300px&amp;h=200px"><img src="' . $snap . '' . urlencode($url) . '?w=' . $w . '&h=' . $h . '" alt="' . $alt . '" style="border:1px solid #333;padding:2px;"/></a>';
    return $img;
}

add_shortcode("snap", "wpr_snap");

This is what i see

Good luck.

Answer 2

Accessing the image via Lightbox isn't a problem. While you might run into performance concerns and, of course, you don't have ultimate control over the contents of the image (it could go down), there isn't a technical problem with loading the image via Lightbox.

Grabbing an image remotely and setting it to a featured thumbnail isn't a huge stretch, but should probably be thought of a different way.

Take a look at this question for an idea: (http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/29198/add-post-thumbnail-from-external-image-with-plugin