| Simple Image Gallery Pro (plugin) |
|
|
| Friday, 10 April 2009 | |
INSTALLATIONFirst of all, make sure you always download the latest version. Use our PDS system for that. If you just bought the plugin, you already have the latest version.The following instructions apply to version 2.0.4: After you download the main zip file, extract it and 2 zip files will be created.
Finally, navigate to Mambots >> Site Mambots (for Joomla! 1.0.x) or Extensions >> Plugin Manager (for Joomla! 1.5.x) and publish the plugin. To edit the plugin parameters, simply click on its name "Simple Image Gallery Pro (by JoomlaWorks)". REQUIREMENTSIn order for Simple Image Gallery PRO to function properly, please make sure that you are running at least PHP 4 and that PHP's GD image library is installed on your server (common webhosts have GD installed by default).You also have to make sure that Joomla's /cache folder is writable, in other words, check that the permissions for this folder are 755 or 777. HOW DOES IT WORK? The concept is simple. You want to add image galleries inside your articles (content items)! First set the "Root folder" of all galleries in the plugin's settings. By default it's the "images/stories" folder. Now create a new folder anywhere inside your root folder, for example let's say this folder is summer_trip_to_italy and upload there all your images. Go ahead and create a new content item (or open an existing one) and simply insert {gallery}summer_trip_to_italy{/gallery}, where you want your image gallery to appear inside your text. It doesn't have to be at the end of your article, it can be anywhere you insert it inside your content item. That's it! Fire up your favorite browser, navigate to the above content item et voila! An image gallery inside your content item! If you want to create a gallery from subfolders inside the ROOT folder, simply add them like this: {gallery}folder/subfolder/othersubfolder{/gallery}. In other words, write the path to your target folder without any slashes at the beginning or the end of your path (it's added auto-magically!). You can have as many galleries as you want inside each content item, since caching takes care of performance. Thumbnails are not generated every time the page with the galleries loads, but after certain intervals, specified in the plugin parameters. The default interval (cache expiration time) is 120 minutes (2 hours). Don't forget to adjust the width and height of the thumbnails. Decreasing the width means you are adding more thumbnails in each row of the gallery. So, experiment before going public. Also, set the image quality of the created thumbnails. Low quality means better loading times. For performance issues, prefer not to use over 50 images per content item, otherwise you're just overweighing your pages. The plugin will have no problem handling the conversion, it's just that your users will wait for many thumbnails to load. Alternatively, you can "switch" to "single thumbnail" mode and launch your galleries from one thumbnail only! That's right! E.g. you can launch a slideshow of 50 images from a single thumbnail, without overweighing your article page with thumbnail images. The user sees all full-sized images by navigating with the "previous" and "next" buttons within the popu window! This obviously saves you both bandwidth and server CPU, plus, it can be used more efficiently in situations where you want to display a bunch of presentations! GOING PRO!Multiple "Popup" EnginesSince v2, Simple Image Gallery PRO utilizes 10 popup engines for ultimate style and compatibility with various frameworks. Included are 2 engines supporting "slideshow" mode and our brand new popup engine SimpleBox (soon to be released as standalone). Proper checks will make sure that Mootools is not loaded multiple times in Joomla! 1.5. Popup engines utilizing jQuery will download the latest library version minified from the new "Google AJAX Libraries API" service, which means faster load times for your website and your gallery.Custom galleries"Simple Image Gallery PRO" provides the user the ability to have customized image galleries. For this to happen, we have included 4 additional "switches", which you can use to set different width, height, display mode and caption mode per gallery! That means you can bypass the global settings "Thumbnail viewport width", "Thumbnail viewport height", "Display Mode" and "Default caption (label) handling" and have for example image galleries that display thumbnails in different dimensions within the same article.To do that you need to insert 4 values in the tags used by the plugin. The syntax is the following: {gallery}folder_path:thumbs_width:thumbs_height:display_mode:caption_mode{/gallery} Watch out for the seperator, which is the character ":".
So if for example you want to insert an image gallery in some article with thumbnails displaying in 300px width and 160px height, while keeping the "normal" display mode (showing all thumbs, not just the first one), with caption showing generic messages, you would insert the following tag: {gallery}folder/some_folder:300:160:0:1{/gallery} ...which translates to: "create image gallery from the images inside 'folder/some_folder', give them a width of 300px and a height of 160px, do not display them (0) in "single thumbnail" mode and display generic captions (1) for every thumbnail. If we did want to display the gallery in "single thumbnail" mode, then we would insert: {gallery}folder/some_folder:300:160:1:1{/gallery}. Important! These values are not manadatory. This means you can use: {gallery}some_folder:200:160{/gallery} to adjust dimensions only to thumbs (no change in display mode) or even {gallery}some_folder::160{/gallery} to adjust just the height (the width value was ommitted). If we wanted to simply switch the gallery to "single thumbnail" mode, then we would just add something like: {gallery}some_folder:::1{/gallery}. When you don't enter one of the 3 values, it is assumed you are using the global ones. Simple, right? Individual captions/labels on popup images"Simple Image Gallery PRO" gives you the ability to easily set individual captions (labels) on popup images. This is a feature many people have asked for, especially photographers and other such professionals, who want to add some comment in their photos and not just have a generic message appearing. Although using EXIF data from JPEG images originally sounded like a nice idea, it soon became obvious to us the trouble in which users would get to add a few captions to their images, as well as the limitations posed (no support for GIF or PNG images). So we decided that a simple text file would do a better job. So how do you add custom captions/labels to your images?Simply enable the related option "Default caption (label) handling" in the plugin parameters and the required labels.txt file for each gallery will be automatically generated with some sample text in. All you have to do then is simply open and edit the labels.txt file of the gallery for which you want to have captions. You can freely use HTML inside the description, just make sure you have one caption per line. After you edit the labels.txt file for a gallery, you would end up with something like: filename1.jpg|Trip to Italy|You can see us here in piazza di Roma other_filename.png|caption title|and this is another caption<br />with some HTML <b>in it</b>! trip_to_canada.gif|caption title|SIG Pro is pretty cool! As you can easily understand, each caption is broken down to 3 parts:
Templates overrides for both Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x (added in v2.0.3+)
Since v2.0.3 we have added the possibility for template overrides in Simple Image Gallery PRO for both Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x. |
|
| Last Updated ( Friday, 22 January 2010 ) |
