Publish post with one click

Today I worked hard on the database structure of NextGEN Gallery. As there is a strong demand for nicer permalinks, I need to add some new database fields. It’s a horrible work if you would like to keep always a backward compatibility. I remember very good the beginning of this plugin, it’s a delight to add new features when you didn’t need to consider to break existing features. Anyway, it’s also motivating when so much people use my plugins.

At the end of my day I add a little new function for my own needs. Post a image from the manage gallery page with just one click, hope you like it :

IE Users – Welcome to rounded corners !

Downloaded the IE9 Beta yesterday to test the “new” experience and I’m really happy to welcome all IE user now to rounded corner. I’ve tested jQuery UI dialog and the progressbar, when you upload your images. It look’s really much better then in IE8 (or IE7, don’t talk about IE6) :

And here IE 8 mode (the ugly of the web) :

Hot topics – or – how to request for help

More than 6000 threads in the WordPress.org forums, only the word “plugin” is hotter than “NextGEN Gallery”. Let me thank you for your patience & help during all the time. To maintain a plugin for such a amount of user is really a big challenge. I know that you need for your projects modification, you have a problem or didn’t understand the way how I realized it in my plugin. The forums should be the right place to get the help. Let me give you some tips to get the best support :

1. Be patient when you need a answer, sometimes it takes time until somebody answer (more than 1 hour ).
2. Search first for an answer, maybe someone had the same problem already. With over 6000 threads it could be possible…
3. Disable all other plugins and test it again, often it’s a conflict with a other plugin.
4. If the gallery didn’t look good, switch to the default WordPress theme and check the behavior again. If the default theme works fine, contact the theme author.
5. Use a descriptive subject for your problem (“I have a problem” or “Problems with NextGEN Gallery” is not that best).
6. Add always the tag “nextgen-gallery” to your request, I’m looking only for this tag.
7. Be patient when you need a answer, sometimes it takes time until somebody answer (more than 1 day).
8. Do not post any comment which is not related to that thread, open a new one.
9. Post a link to your page, often it’s possible to see the problem by looking into the html source.
10. Don’t request help in the comment section on my blog, it’s the wrong place.
11. Never ever send me a reminder per mail, I really hate that.
12. Be patient when you need a answer, sometimes it takes time until somebody answer (more than 1 week).
13. If you fixed your problem, please give some feedback, it’s important to know when something is solved.
14. You still need VIP Support ? You can’t wait for an answer in the forums or you hate forums… Well, Yes I can help, consider it’s not cheap , but cheaper than the VIP Support from Automattic 🙂

NextGEN Gallery V1.6.0

I’m full of work for the next week so I need to speed up the release a bit. NextGEN Gallery 1.6.0 is now available for download at WordPress.org. This release will introduce the new jQuery slideshow and a couple of fixes for Multisites. I hope you like the new slideshow features on your mobile phone. There is a lot of room for improvements, so I’m open for ideas and contribution in any direction.

As always : Please post questions in the forums. Thanks !

Update : Fixed a bug with the slideshow & zip upload, Thanks for reporting in the forums and keep patient !

Download NextGEN Gallery Version 1.6.1
Release @ WordPress.org

NextGEN Gallery V1.6.0 Gold Master

Final test week, next week is release time… I’ve corrected some minor issues and updated the german language file. As reported in the forums there are still some issues in a Multi-site setup (i.e. Domain mapping) which I will not catch in this release. Contribution are always welcome !

Top 10

The Top 10 of downloaded translation files for NextGEN Gallery :

Funny statistic 🙂

NextGEN Gallery Version 1.6.0 beta 3

Time for a new version and your feedback. This version include two new features :

• WordPress 3.0 Multisite support
  I never used WPMU but I did my best to get it running again under Multisite environment. As you know it run into a upgrade loop, this version should fix this problem and more over you can upgrade all blogs via one click
• jQuery Cycle Slideshow integration
  It’s maybe not the best looking solution, as I wrote in my previous post their exists tons of good solutions, but it comes nearest to the flash slideshow layout. Just browse your gallery on your iPhone or iPad and give me your feedback.

Please report any bug in the forums. Thanks !

Update : New Beta 3 should fix issues with IE browser and Slideshow. If you upgrade a multisite blog to this version, please deactivate / re-activate the plugin “site wide”.

Goodbye Flash ?

I’m working now a couple of weeks on a new slideshow options, which is based on pure Javascript, so it’s possible to view them as well on a iPad/iPhone and other mobile devices.  I estimated that it will take just a couple of hours, but I ran into various challenges. I would like to share some of my problems :

First of all I looked for all the great jQuery Plugins on the market, here you find IMHO the best ones. I thought that I just need to grab one of these slideshow plugins and add this to my code, but I came across a couple of problems to replace the existing flash solution.  A flash slideshow solves three  issues :

• Any theme related style sheet didn’t affected the flash layout
• It load images step by step
• It can resize mixed image formats ( portrait / landscape )

NextGEN Gallery is a plugin which should nearly handle all kind of themes / layout / formats, if you look into the samples above you find a lot of great designed slideshow, but they will not fit to every theme layout. So I need to pickup a solution which requires a minimum of styling, the rest should be pat of the theme author.

Another point : The most jQuery Slideshow plugins are not designed for loading speed, they parse a hidden div/ul list which contain the images. This is ok for 5-10 images, but not for a gallery which can contain 100+ images. A page load will blow up. So I need to add a AJAX based loading for the images.  I study a couple of plugins and decided to use jQuery Cycle, it contains a lot of functions and can handle a AJAX loading of images.

In the second step I’m looking for a reliable solution to resize a image to the wanted size and keep the ratio, also jQuery Cycle has here some problems. WordPress.com introduce a slideshow feature and while I study the solution I recognize that they resize the images on server side, no need to  handle this later in the script code. Very good for bandwidth, but I need to cache resized images in this case , otherwise your web hoster and your server cpu usage will blow up.

Currently I load the full images step by step and setup then the wanted container  height, I’m still working on a  solution to center images. You can watch a first result here :

http://nextgen-gallery.com/playground/jquery-cycle/

Any hints / comments  for a better solution are welcome

Adobe Lightroom

A cool addon plugin for Adobe Lightroom export direct the images to NextGEN gallery. You can optionally create a post including the exported photos (the post is left in draft mode, so you can edit it later).

Download this plugin here.

WordPress 3.0 Memory Requirements: 256 MB

In the last weeks after the release of WordPress 3.0 I got again a lot of failure reports in the forums like :

I am getting the following error on a fresh install. Any idea why?

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 58368 bytes) in /vservers/mysite/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/widgets/widgets.php on line 308

The reason is the increased memory needs for WordPress itself, a developer noticed that they raised the requirement up to 256MB ! Although this value is currently absolute unrealistic for a shared hosting, it means you need to increase your memory limit. I tested my plugin here with 48MB and 64MB limits and it works fine… If you can use the plugin but you are not longer able to create thumbnails, please remind my blog post two years ago, it’s the same issue…