creating a video gallery

[gbswales]

I am still getting to grips with xara and making a large personal website to give me expeience - Previously I used FrontPage but most hosting servers have dropped FP extensions - it was also seriously outdated and had too much propriatry code - however I knew my way around it and was confident going into HTML to trouble shoot. I flirted with Dreamweaver but found it complex and diffcult so here I am using Xara.

I am gradually learning the built in features and have now set up some photo galleries more or less the way that I want them - I now want to create access to family and other videos and would like to set up a video gallery. When I thought I was going to use dreamweaver I invested in a program called video light box which, as its name implies, makes it easy to create an HTML5 gallery which displays small thumbnails ans then opens each video in a llightbox window that you can determine the size of. The videos will be aa mix of MP4 files and others that are hosted on youtube. I can create a gallery page easy enough which gives me a page of html, the associated files in another folder and I think some CSS. It looks to me quite difficult to take pages created in another program and then drop them into an xara themed website, unless there is some klind of widget provided by the other software (which there is not)

I have tried importing videos from Youtube using the supplie widget which althoug a bit messy and time consuming does allow me to get the videos dsplayed on my xara web pages but only displaying at the size I want them to play. I cant see any way to have thumbnails that are maybe 350 pixels wide which when clicked open up the video ovre the page in a much larger size (at least 640x480). I guess I could create single pages for each video and then have a page of thumbnails but that was my solution in Front Page and you rarely see videos displayed this way now. A single page with lightbox style pop-ups would look much more prefessional and should take a lot less time to create.

Has anyone managed to do something like this using xara?

In the near future I am planning to rebuild another site for my old school - this is essentially an archive site with hundreds of photos and images of documents mostly PDFs which I would llike to handle in a similar way - thankfully there are no videos as the school closed down in the early 70's but we do have other feature such as a "former pupil register" where past pupils can add themselves along with anecdotes and stories. I Uses an online databse in ZOHO for this which does at least output embed code so I am hoping that I will be able to use this - though it is not entirely clear to me how I can embed HTML code in pages without a widget

Any advice or suggestions that anyone can offer I will be most grateful for but in the meantime I will carry on my light reading of the 500 page manual!

[Egg Bramhill]

Why not use the YouTube playlist feature and embed it in an iframe. See attached.

If not this way, place the embedded videos seperately on pop-up layers. See attachment.