Ajax & PHP XML News Slide Show

This is a fun and simple project about creating a news slideshow with ajax & php. It's a two part project. **Overview** Taking an xml feed of news stories [title,image,description,link] Displaying them similar to: [login to view URL] Notice the arrows that let the user go forward and backward. However it should be much nicer and smother looking, here's and example of the quality we'd like: [login to view URL] **Part 1:** Doing this with just 1 xml feed url. ** Part 2:** Doing this with multiple (1-3) xml feeds picking the articles in random order. ## Deliverables **Requirements:** * Not all the articles (xml nodes) will have images, only the ones with images should appear. * The links to the images in the xml look like: [login to view URL]~pix/d-sabah-2~[login to view URL] You will need to replace with 200x200 to 400x400 because the 200 pixle wide images are too small. eg: the link above would be: [login to view URL]~pix/d-sabah-2~[login to view URL] * The photos will need to be cropped on the top and bottom * The total size of the image will be: 400 pixles wide and 245 pixles high * The titles will appear under the photo in a shaded grey semi transparent box. * Here is a demo how the end product should look: [login to view URL] * The article description must appear below the box. * Some descriptions may have html, you can either strip the html or render the text with the html. However you cannot actually show the tags. * This site currently has reference to prototype & script.aculo.us. So the solution will need to use those javascript libraries and nothing else. **Important Notes** * The site has php 4 running. If you need php 5 let me know right away so I can install it. * I'd like all the work to be able to run as an php include so the rest of the source code says clean and minimal * I'm flexible about how you approach the solution as some things can be done in PHP or Javascript. * I would recommend setting this up a a cron job that runs every 5 minutes. * That creates a list of articles and generates the cropped images to a special folder * * That creates a list of articles and generates the cropped images to a special folder