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…

Monosildeshow for NextGEN Gallery

On request of the author I added a new addon plugin for NextGEN Gallery and Monoslideshow. It’s a flash based slideshow with amazing transition effects and more over you can customize the slideshow in nearly all aspects. I’ve added a option to replace the default slideshow of NextGEN Gallery, so you didn’t need to update your posts/pages. It’s currently in a late beta stage, where not all features ready (Custom presets), but you can work with it if you have owned the Monoslideshow. Leave a comment if you have a good idea what should be added to the plugin.

See here for a demo.

Download NextGEN Monoslideshow
Beta version @ wordpress.org

New bugfix release

In this minutes I’ve uploaded a new bugfix release NextGEN Gallery Version 1.5.2 . There is one XSS bug fixed in the media-rss script and I also solved a  issue with old shortcodes. I encouraged everybody to update to the latest version, or if you on whatever reason stay would stay at your version, please  update the file media-rss.php from here : http://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery/source/detail?r=718

Please report further problems in the forums, thanks !

NextGEN Gallery V1.5.0

I’ve uploaded the new version. I would like to highlight three new features :

1. Backup feature : You can now create a backup when you resize the original images, and recover them later if needed
2. Post thumbnail support : I’ve added the full Post Thumbnail support, which is a excellent feature in the new WordPress V3.0 Theme TwentyTen
3. Auto translation file loader : Now you can download via one click the latest language file. look for it in the overview menu

Please let me note, that the current version is not compatible with BuddyPress or WPMU, I will look for this in the next month.

Please report any bug in the forums. Thanks !

Download NextGEN Gallery Version 1.5.0
Release version @ wordpress.org

NextGEN Gallery Tutorial

I’m surprised how many tutorials are available for NextGEN Gallery at YouTube. This one is great:

Perfect, doesn’t require any translation…

NextGEN Gallery v1.5.0 Release candidate 1

I fixed a couple for bugs for Post Thumbnails support and also added a new auto downloader for translation files. This is now the last version before I will uploaded it to wordpress.org. If nobody reports a big problem, I expect to release it in one week.

Help testing now … Thanks !

NextGEN Gallery Version 1.5.0 beta 1

I closed the work on my next release. Three main new features added :

– Images can now be backup and restored (THX to Simone Fumagalli)
– Resize automatic after the upload (THX to Simone Fumagalli)
– Post Thumbnail support

Happy testing !