After a very very long break, I’m starting to work on the next version 1.8 of NextGEN Gallery. At first I’m looking for XML Sitemaps support. This should help for a better search results about images. I need to contact some author of Sitemap plugins, so I didn’t need to rewrite the same code again.
What is your preferred Sitemap plugin ?
I’m reading every day the forum posts, really. I didn’t answer each day, but I study nearly every request & problem. With Version 1.7.0 I introduced a new auto complete feature, this feature works fine on all of my blogs and test blogs. Unfortunately it also has some side effect, it requires a newer script library then WordPress currently shipped out. So I added this new version manually, but some plugins & themes didn’t handle script calls in the right way.
Very often I need to request to disable other plugins & themes, just to test if the failure is really inside NextGEN Gallery or not. For this purpose I’m introduce now my first version of a plugin health check :
This new tool can be used via the overview menu and it checks for a couple of common problems :
I’m not sure if it causes false positive results, but it maybe help us all to verify if NextGEN Gallery can run fine on your blog. The new Version 1.7.3 is now available.
No I’m not dead, just take a longer break… or should I say : Blame it on my Playstation 3 ? Anyway just released in this minutes a new WordTube version which added the ability to sort a playlist. Not that big thing, the next step should be a integration of HTML5 video tags.
Have a nice sunday !
The new version is now avaiable. Here are a list of the most important changes :
Please report problems ONLY at the forums, Thanks !
Download NextGEN Gallery Version 1.7.0
Release @ WordPress.org
My internal tests are fine, so last week for testing. Please download the new release candidate and let me know if you encounter any problems.
Since 2006 I go with the WordPress development and I’m always really impressed the way it works for small and large installation. For 4 years I’m now writing plugins, I must admit that in the beginning I had no clue about queries, performance and traffic. I learned a lot from the code base of WordPress and improved my plugin’s as good as possible. wp-Table, my first public plugin is a mess if you look for database queries, never would do this again 🙂
Today I’m focused on NextGEN-Gallery , which is a real challenge for me. It has a large user base and is used in various way. I spend a lot of time for the upgrade process, so that a new version (hopefully) will not break your work. It’s real easy to write a new plugin, but when you have a lot of user, every single line needs to be reviewed. This makes the develeopment for my plugin so hard, I’m really no professional programmer, I never used or tested my work on high traffic blogs, never worked with large multi site environment, nexer used more than 1000 images.
So instead of adding more and more features, I will work in the next time just on scalability and UI. Some time ago I ask how many images you have uploaded with NextGEN Gallery, and I’m really impressed about your response. But sadly this amount of images shows the current limits of my plugin. I never thought in this amount, so I programmed some features which are good for a couple of image/galleries, but not for hundreds of them.
One big flaw is the TinyMCE Dialog window. You can select in the WYSIWYG Editor easily a image or gallery from the drop down field and insert the shortcode, but it’s a mess if you have 10000+ images. One first improvement is part of the upcoming V1.7.0 : Auto complete for drop down fields.
With the help of jQuery UI Autocomplete, you can select one of the last 50 images or you can search for any image and select then the desired image. There are more places in the admin back end which need as well a full rework (i.e. Album management) but I just would like to get first your feedback on this new feature. I finished the first beta of V1.7.0 and it would be great if some of you can test this version. I’m already upgraded my test blog & live system, so it should be stable enough to give it a shot. Let me know here in the comment section if you have any problem, or feel free to open a issue at my Google Page. Thanks !
After 5 years my Powershot S2 IS goes into retirement. I’m very happy with my first digital camera, but during the last year I need a camera with a better result at low light. All the time I’m looking for a DSLR, but I’m just a hobby photographer and so the form factor is at the end more important then the possibilities. Today I receive my second camera : Powershot S95 with HD video and (again) RAW images…
The people behind the WP.org introduced a new pie chart. It returns a percentage breakdown of the versions being actively used by that plugin’s users. I’m very surprised how many user are currently uses (or activated) NextGEN Gallery. It’s more than 80.000 blogs worldwide… More over I’m astonished how many user are not updating to the latest version, only 18% installed the latest version….
A cool new addon plugin is released today : A jQuery GalleryView plugin for NextGen Gallery. No more breaking WordPress / jQuery with the CowTools SmoothGallery plugin. You can see some screenshots about it on the blog of John Brien or download the plugin from wordpress.org :
Download WordPress NextGen GalleryView
Release @ WordPress.org
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 :
alex.rabe 