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Smashly Now Running WP 3.0 RC1

by on June 6, 2010 in Miscellany

Hi everyone! This is the third or fourth site that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0 RC1, and everything is looking good.

I would like to note that anyone running PHP 4 on a 1and1 hosted site might have some troubles installing PhotoSmash (and NextGEN Gallery too). It appears that something is weird with their PHP 4 settings that WordPress doesn’t like. But you can easily move to PHP 5 (and you should), since 1AND1 gives you a choice.

Anyway, I’m excited by the new possibilities afforded by WP 3.0. PhotoSmash appears to be playing nicely with it, so enjoy!

Cheers,
Byron

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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

Comments { 25 }

Problem: Thumbnails link to the Post Page instead of Image

by on July 28, 2009 in Troubleshooting

Why do all of my Thumbnails link to the Post page instead of using the Caption Style I selected in Gallery Settings?

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.

Comments { 1 }

Problem: Clicking the “Add Photo” link opens up a New Page

by on July 28, 2009 in Troubleshooting

Clicking the “Add Photo” link opens up a New Page, usually a 404 error.  What gives?

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!

Comments { 19 }
contrib-gal

PhotoSmash 0.3.01 Released!

by on July 25, 2009 in PhotoSmash, Plugins

contrib-galThis release brings new features, Contributor Galleries being the biggest, and bug fixes.

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

Comments { 6 }

New Demo Page…and Author Galleries in 0.3.01

by on July 23, 2009 in News, PhotoSmash

Hi PhotoSmashers! I’ve created a new demo page here on Smashly. Eating one’s own dogfood and all that. Check it out…load some images!

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

Comments { 5 }

PhotoSmash 0.3 Released!

by on July 13, 2009 in News, PhotoSmash, Plugins

At long last! PhotoSmash 0.3 is being released in conjunction with the launch of this site. At some point, you have to go ahead and unlock the doors and turn on the lights.

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!

Comments { 2 }