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!

I’m making some enhancements to the photo tagging that is currently available in PhotoSmash that will be coming out in a week or so. The test blog I’m using for that development is running WordPress 2.9 as well.

I think 2.9 will be a huge benefit to all of you who are using the Add to WP Media option. This is going to let you do some editing of your images using the new image editor in the WordPress Media gallery admin pages. This includes rotating images, resizing thumbnails, and grabbing different crop areas for thumbs.

Very, very useful update to WordPress! A hearty “THANK YOU!” to the WP core Team.

And while I’m at it, thanks to all of my PhotoSmash users for sticking with me through this year! PhotoSmash went live back in February of this year (I think…). It’s come a long way, and the user community has been very helpful in rooting out the problems and pointing the way toward the features that make PhotoSmash a unique and hopefully useful piece of the WordPress community.

Cheers to all, and Merry Christmas!
Byron

Enough rambling…so, what’s in PhotoSmash Extend???

Create New WordPress Posts on Uploading an Image

This is the hallmark feature of PhotoSmash Extend!  It gives you the ability to create a new Post when someone uploads an image to a PhotoSmash Gallery.  Here are a few of the configuration options:

• Use attributes in the normal photosmash Shortcode to turn on new post creation for a particular upload form: [\photosmash create_post=newpost\] (without the slashes…can’t figure out how to write a shortcode that doesn’t look like a shortcode to WordPress )
  • The attribute is:  create_post;  the value is the name of the custom layout to use for building your new post
• You create an html template in PhotoSmash Custom Layouts that will be used for new posts…you can have as many as you like and invoke them in the shortcode above
• Add preview_post=true to the shortcode to show the user a Preview link to the new post after upload is complete
• Control who can create new posts:  Admins, Authors/Contributors, or Subscribers
• Control the default status of the new post:  Pending, Draft, or Published
• Show a multiple-select list box of your WordPress categories (options for setting the category parent node – does all categories by default, excluding categories, setting the depth of the hierarchy to show, and setting whether it is multi or single select – multi select by default)
• Allows setting a Custom Field in the post for a post thumbnail
• You can use a standard form or a custom form for this upload.
• Your new post template can be as complex as you like and you can use standard and custom fields at will…it can even include shortcodes (like a new photosmash gallery within the new post)

So, it’s pretty flexible.  You’re creativity is pretty much set free on this.

Module 2: Set Text/Image/Ad/etc Inserts to Display within a Gallery

This module of PhotoSmash Extend lets you set up special inserts to display within your galleries.  You control what you want the insert to be…you can specify as many different ones that you like and it will rotate through them.  So, you could set a Google ad, an image, and some other kind of message for one Insert Set and assign that set to a gallery (or as many galleries as you want).  Those galleries will display those 3 inserts starting on the image # you specified to start and skipping X number of images until it shows the next one.  You can put a limit on how many inserts get show, and the gallery will loop through those 3 inserts until it hits your maximum # of inserts for the page.

Create unlimited number of insert sets and assign them to galleries.  Each gallery can only be assigned one Insert Set.

Probably helpful to somebody out there.

If you’re interested, send me an email at byron at whypad . com.

Cheers,

Byron

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

Simple fix:

1. Go to PhotoSmash Settings.
2. At the bottom of the first tab (General Defaults), find and uncheck the “Thumbs link to Post on Main Page” setting.

If “Thumbs link to Post on Main Page” is checked, all the thumbnails on the Main Page, Category Pages, and Archive Pages will link to the actual post that the gallery is being displayed in. Once you’re in the post itself, the linking should behave normally, but I have seen a problem with a blog that doesn’t start from the main page and that was using Ugly URLs…I’ll look into it.

This symptom can have a couple of different sources.

1. Most frequently, this is a template problem.  There are two template tags (PHP code that is specific to WordPress and used in Themes to make stuff happen) that should be called in all WordPress Themes…well, at least all the ones that intend to use plugins or do anything cool:
   1. wp_head() – should be called in the header.php file,
   2. wp_footer() – should be called in footer.php

   Some of the commercial frameworks may have abstracted these calls away into their own hooks. But if you’re using a theme by one of these guys, this is probably not your problem.

2. If #1 is not the problem, then there might be a plugin that is causing a problem in either
   1. The PHP script on the server – you’ll probably see a PHP error somewhere
   2. The Javascript on the client – if you run FireFox, get FireBug and it can help you spot JavaScript errors

   Try deactivating your plugins to see if you can isolate the offending plugin.  If there are lots of activated plugins, I usually try deactivating big chunks of them instead of 1-by-1.  Figure out which big chunk the problem is in and narrow down from there.

   After you find the offending plugin, the fun begins…you can try to fix it yourself, or try to get the plugin developer to fix it for you.

   Free tip: If you’re running a bunch of plugins ( 10 or more ), you might want to consider if you really need all of them…maybe not. Plugins usually require extra processing time, so in general, the fewer the faster (notable exceptions exist). All the same, don’t be afraid of using plugins, just be selective.  They are the one of the greatest features of WordPress.

3. Another problem might be clicking the Add Photo button before the page is completely loaded.  The Thickbox initialization occurs late in the page load, so you have to wait for it…I’m going to hide the Add Photo button until it’s ready in a future version of PhotoSmash.
4. Another issue on the user’s end might be that their browser might be blocking Javascript (or have it turned off).  The upload is AJAX and requires Javascript be on, even if you’re always displaying the upload form (forgoing the Thickbox).

If you come up with some other causes and solutions, please post below and I’ll add to the list!

Check out the Change Log for all changes.

Check out the How-to for adding the contributor galleries to your WordPress blog’s Author pages!

Cheers!

Byron

Working on Version 0.3.01

In other news, the next version of PhotoSmash will bring you an option to show all contributors’ images in their WordPress Author page. I’m kind of excited about figuring out a way to enable that without having you tweak your templates with template tags. I wanted the images to show up at the top of Author page, so what I did was tap into the get_posts WordPress hook and use a little PHP array magic to “unshift” a new Post onto the posts array. When WordPress does the loop, it displays the gallery just like a gallery embedded in any other post. The gallery can use custom layouts, custom fields, etc, just like any other gallery. The only trick is that it will contain all the images by a given contributor, and it will not contain an upload form…of course ;P .

I hope to have 0.3.01 out the door to you guys this weekend!

Cheers,
Byron

If you’ve been using PhotoSmash 0.2.62 (the previous stable version), then there are a lot of new features to explore in 0.3. If you’ve been Beta testing 0.3 (which itself is a beta ), then thanks! Nothing has changed since 0.2.996 (RC3), but you’ll want to do the upgrade anyway.

The documentation will be coming soon…I promise!