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Correct Version of Lightbox for PhotoSmash

by on February 4, 2010 in PhotoSmash, Plugins, WordPress

There are 2 versions of Lightbox in the WordPress plugins directory, and only one of them works properly with PhotoSmash.  The one you want is Lightbox 2 by Rupert Morris.

There are a number of other Lightbox-like plugins that you can use as well, each with a slightly different flair than Lightbox.  One of my favorites is Shadowbox JS.  Very similar, and you don’t even have to change your Rel setting.  There’s also Fancy Box, Thickbox (not a bad choice since the script is being loaded for the PhotoSmash forms anyway…this reduces your overall load times for your visitors), Gray Box, Slim box, you could get old naming them all…and many of them are very cool!

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tulips-rating

PhotoSmash now has Star Ratings!

by on August 20, 2009 in PhotoSmash, WordPress

tulips-ratingPhotoSmash users, check out the new star rating system!  It’s a simple 5 star system, with some standard features.  You can see a live demo here on Smashly at the PhotoSmash Demo page.

This is still a bit of a work-in-progress, though it should be functional and future changes should be transparent to you.

PhotoSmash Star Rating Features

  • Standard 5 star system
  • Gallery specific settings
  • 2 default positions: overlay top of image (as seen in image above), or after caption
  • Allow anonymous ratings, one per IP address – set this in PhotoSmash Settings (bottom of first tab). It’s global to all galleries that have
  • Toggle switch allows user to hide/show all ratings per gallery
  • To enable a gallery, go to Gallery Settings and edit the gallery, then set the Rating type option at the bottom of first tab
  • Hovering over pops up a little info box on the overlay display
  • Feature in the works: I’m working on adding a rating type for vote up/down type ratings.  This will allow photo contests and other applications
  • Feature in the works: Sort by highest rated images
  • Need to get Widgets going to have a Highest Rated widget

Feature that would be nice: right now, this system doesn’t show partial stars.  If anyone wants to take this on, that would be great!!

WordPress has some great star rating plugins for rating comments and posts, e.g. GD Star Rating and WP-PostRatings, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find one that could be plugged in to use for rating images with PhotoSmash.  I ended up adapting some code from a  jQuery rating prototype that Karl Swedenberg put togther here, itself based on code by Ritesh found here.

Special thanks to Milan of GD Star Rating for the use of the stars used in the gallery!

Appeal for Help!

If anyone wants to improve the rating system, I am definitely open to some help!  Ideally, the ratings would display partial stars, as mentioned above.  Also, the ability to select other star sets….and if anyone creates star sets that they would be willing to share with the community!

Let me know in the Help page if you find any problems!

Cheers,

Byron

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