Last year, Björn from Modularweb created the Piecemaker, a completely free, open source, 3D Flash image rotator gallery. Now, to kick off 2011, Björn's giving away The Piecemaker 2: totally revamped, with brand new features. Read on for more!

[piecemaker id='1'/]

What's New?

Building on the original, the Piecemaker 2 now includes:

• Unlimited transition effects
• The ability to include SWF files and videos
• Improved navigation (using tooltips)
• Animated shadows

It's also entirely XML-based, and the HTML/CSS parsing has been improved, allowing special characters to be used. Plus, images can now contain hyperlinks to other websites.

What About WordPress?

A lot of readers wanted to use the original Piecemaker gallery in their WordPress blogs -- so many that Nettuts+ published a tutorial explaining how to do just that!

This time around, Kuba from MassivePixelCreation has made it simple. He's worked with Björn to create a free WordPress extension you can use to embed the Piecemaker 2 right into your site.

Get it Now!

The Piecemaker 2 is open source, so feel free to download it, use it in any project you like, learn from it, modify it and improve it if you can. We'd love to see what you do with it. Also -- and of course this is no binding condition -- we'd love to showcase your work on the official Piecemaker website.

Further Resources

If you want to know more about The Piecemaker 2, get yourself over to ModularWeb for a FAQ section and a Showcase of examples. Also, stay up to date with further developments by following @modularweb, @mProCreation and @envatoactive on Twitter.

Note: If you're getting an error message about an invalid header when trying to add this to WordPress, then here's a tip from reader Billy:

I got the same error message at first – then I unzipped the original Piecemaker .zip archive, and browsed the folder contents. There is a “Read Me” file, as well as a few .jpg screen shots with helpful instructions on how to modify the slider and so forth. There is also another .zip file called “piecemaker2.zip.” If you upload THIS file through the WordPress Plugin “Upload” utility, and activate it as you normally would, everything works great!

Thanks, Billy!