| 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 2.5 or newer: IMPORTANT NOTE: Joomla! 1.0.x is no longer supported. Simple Image Gallery Pro supports only Joomla! versions 1.5 to 2.5. There is 1 single file you use to install the plugin, which is compatible with Joomla! 1.5-1.7. After you download this zip file, upload and install the plugin by using the Joomla! installer. Navigate to:
Finally, navigate to Extensions >> Plugin Manager (all Joomla! versions) 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). For the Flickr integration, PHP5 is required.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. If the plugin cannot generate the thumbnails due to bad permissions, you will see a related notification. 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). (You can see the thumbnails in your Joomla! site's cache manager and you can delete the thumbnails whenever you want so they are instantly re-created upon subsequent page loads by visitors.) 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 smaller thumbnail sizes and therefore better loading times for your site. 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" display 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 popup window! This can come handy when you want to display a sequence of images as a presentation. Flickr Integration: Since October 2011, Flickr changed some of its API requirements and now an API key is required in order for you to be able to embed Flickr photo sets on your site. The process to get an API key is very simple: Sign in to your Flickr account, then visit http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/ and choose to get a non-commercial key. Name your app as your website. You can safely use this API key on more than one websites, even on different domains. Update on October 2011: It is important to understand that the "Polaroids" gallery layout makes extensive use of CSS3 which is not fully supported by all versions of Internet Explorer (IE). In order to make IE6 to IE8 compatible with this gallery we use additional JavaScript code which "triggers" behaviour in those browsers similar to CSS3's capabilities (e.g. thumbnail rotation, shadows etc.). Thus the layout is not 100% identical to modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. IE9 however, being an actively developed browser by Microsoft (which supports some CSS3 specs), is known to have issues rendering this particular layout natively, which we're currently investigating. We strongly advise users whose site visitors are mostly coming from IE to possibly use a different gallery layout. GOING PRO!Multiple "Popup" EnginesSimple Image Gallery PRO utilizes 9 popup engines for ultimate style and compatibility with various frameworks. Included are 2 engines supporting "slideshow" mode and our brand new popup engine SimpleBox (also available to download for free). Proper checks will make sure that Mootools or jQuery are not loaded multiple times. Popup engines utilizing jQuery will download the latest library version minified from the "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 6 additional "switches", which you can use to set different width, height, display mode, caption mode, popup engine and gallery layouut per gallery! That means you can bypass the global settings "Thumbnail viewport width", "Thumbnail viewport height", "Display Mode", "Default caption (label) handling", "Popup engine for image galleries" and "Layout template for image galleries", and have for example image galleries that display thumbnails in different dimensions within the same article.To do that you need to insert up to 6 (optional) values in the tags used by the plugin. The syntax is the following: {gallery}folder_path:thumbs_width:thumbs_height:display_mode:caption_mode:popup_engine:gallery_layout{/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}. If we wanted to override the popup engine and the gallery layout as well, we could use something like: {gallery}folder/some_folder:200:80:1:2:jquery_colorbox:Galleria{/gallery} Important! These values are completely optional. 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? Flickr Integration Adding Flickr Sets to Joomla! couldn't get any simpler than this. Just the URL of a Flickr set (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/joomlaworks/sets/72157626907305094/) and paste the URL inbetween the plugin's tags like this: {gallery}http://www.flickr.com/photos/joomlaworks/sets/72157626907305094/{/gallery} ...and you get probably the simplest and fastest way to embed Flickr Sets in Joomla!. Remember to get a Flickr API key first at http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/. For more advanced overrides, all additional values/params as outlined in the previous section are also present for Flickr Set embedding, with the exception of an extra value for the count of images fetched from Flickr. Check this example: {gallery}http://www.flickr.com/photos/joomlaworks/sets/72157626907305094/:20:200:80:1:2:jquery_colorbox:Galleria{/gallery} This translates to: {gallery}flickr_URL:flickr_Image_Count:thumbs_width:thumbs_height:display_mode:caption_mode:popup_engine:gallery_layout{/gallery} 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 xx-XX.labels.txt file (where xx-XX is your site's default language locale) for each gallery will be automatically generated with some sample text in. All you have to do then is simply open and edit the xx-XX.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 xx-XX.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:
In versions prior to 2.5 of the plugin, the caption files where only named labels.txt. If you have already built your caption files, you don't need to worry. The plugin can still read labels.txt files, but any new gallery created will make use of the new naming format. MVC templates: the power to customize the look of your galleriesThe
feature trully setting apart all our commercial plugins from any other Joomla! plugin
are their MVC architecture, currently available in Joomla! for components
and modules only. That means you can use HTML and CSS template overrides
inside your Joomla! template and completely change the way the plugin
elements display on your website! |
|
| Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 February 2012 ) |
