It is always nice to have a fancy slide show on your Joomla based web site. It is even nicer to be able to put slide shows into articles.

The process of creating a slide show is very easy and consists out of three steps:

A. Creating a new 'category' for your images.

B. Uploading images to the server.

C. Assigning uploaded images to the category.

D. Adding a special code to your article to display the slide show.

A Creating a new category for the images.

1. Open the administrator's page and log on.

2. Click on the 'Components/Phoca Gallery/Categories' menu.

3. Click on the 'New' button.

4. Type the title for the category.

5. And click on the 'Save' button located in the top right side of the screen.

Now we have a new category and we can start uploading the images.

B. Uploading images to the server and Assigning uploaded images to the category.

Note that due to the upload time and restrictions on some servers, images should be resized to a more or less 'screen size' - about 640x480 up to 1024x768. See how to resize images and how to resize multiple images.

1. Identify images you want to use for the slide show, copy them to the same folder, resize and rotate if needed.

2. Click on the 'Components/Phoca Gallery/Images' menu.

3. Click on the 'Multiple Add' button located in the top-right side of the screen.

4. Type the name of new folder on the server, and click on the 'Create Folder' button.

5. Click on the name of the new folder to enter into it. We want the images to be uploaded directly to the new folder.

6. Click on the 'Java Upload' tab, then on the 'Browse' button. Select the folder in the 'Folders' panel, and then select all images you want to upload in the 'Files' folder. Click on the 'OK' button.

7. Click on the 'Upload' button.

8. Select the category, check all images

9. And click on the 'Save' button located in the top right side of the screen.

D. Adding a special code to your article to display the slide show.

1. Let us start with checking the ID of the category you want to use.

Click on the 'Categories' link in the Phoca Gallery Control Panel.

The ID of the category will be shown in the very left side of the screen in the column called 'ID'

2. Add a line of code as shown above. Make sure that the categoryid is set correctly to the value read in the step 1. Set detail to 3 to get a autostarting 'fancy' slide show. Set the value to 0 to get more traditionally looking one.