Back from Chicago

Back from my trip, had a really great 4th of July in Chicago. In the meantime WordPress 3.2 went out and I need to fix a problem with the pagination in the admin section. The new release version 1.8.2 is now ready for download.

How many images do you have in your NextGEN Gallery ?

Happy new year ! A user ask in the forums if there are some limits on the amount of albums/galleries/images. And one user answered that he have

44467 Images, 1360 Galleries and 72 Albums !!!

I never tested such an amount of images, but it’s great that the plugin still works for this purpose… How many images do you have in your gallery ? Are you still satisfied ? What could be optimized ?

I start to wrote this plugin  just for some personal projects with not more that 1000 images. I know that some features are not really optimized for a high amount of galleries/images (Drag & Drop Album page is not that good for this amount, TinyMCE Button is not usable). anyway I will do my best to optimze this for the future…

1.000.000

Today at 10:34 CEST my plugin NextGEN gallery hit the one million download counter (This is the 3rd plugin at wordpress.org, didn’t count Akismet as plugin). I really never , never expected this… I remember very good my blog post more that two years ago, that I start the work on this plugin. It was a great expericence to get so much feedback from the whole world for such a little pice of code. 

I would like to take a moment to thank the following people  for being a part of my plugin (Sorry if you are not mentioned, it’s hard to maintain this list) :

Better media handling into core ?

WordPress 2.9 seems to be focus on a better media handling, which is a long awaiting feature for all NGG users. Please vote on the development blog now! You can be sure that I will work on a import filter into the core gallery, when WordPress 2.9 is ready, so that you didn’t loose all your work and effort which you put on NGG….

Hopefully they take a lot of your input, to get the best media gallery system.

Dear hoster : We need more memory !

A lot of people update to WordPress 2.8 and get the message :

Allowed memory size of 33554433 bytes exhausted

So, with WP2.8 we reached now the limit of many hosters (32MB), who is the bad boy ? Can we increase the limit ? I faced a similar problem here with my homepage and wrote a simple plugin for the WordPress dashboard which shows up the limit and current usage. Just for the notes, a WordPress 2.3 + NextGEN Gallery and 10 other plugins require 16.32 Mbyte memory.

Ok, what is the limit for a fresh WordPress 2.8 installation under PHP 4 and PHP 5 ?

Important note for Version 1.2.0

So, the new version is out. You maybe noticed that the flash slideshow is no more working. In this case please check the path of the imagerotator.swf in the gallery options -> slideshow.

If it’s empty or point to the plugin folder, you should upload it again to your upload directory. You can use the WordPress Media uploader or you upload it via FTP. Then press in the gallery options the button “search now”, the correct URL should be entered automatic, otherwise add it manually.

Why do I removed the slideshow from the plugin package ?
Now, the basic issue is based on the fact that my plugin is released under a GPL license, but the great Imagerotator is published under a CC license. To respect both license, i decided to remove the flash file from the package. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t support it, the slideshow is still a core feature.

As always :  Please report further problems at the wp.org forums.

V1.2.0 RC 2 – final candidate

As reported in the forums, I fix a problem with umlauts and special chars. Here is the download link

NextGEN Gallery V1.2.0 RC1

Time to test the next version, I’m happy for any feedback. Here is the list of changes:

– NEW : Support for image tag cloud with shortcode [ tagcloud ]
– NEW : Adding shortcode [recent max=”7″ template=”filename” /] & [random max=”7″ template=”filename” /] to show the most recent/random pictures (THX to Bernhard)
– NEW : Crop thumbnails manually (THX to Simone Fumagalli)
– NEW : Support for i18n with polyglot or qtrans plugin (THX to Boris Glumpler)
– NEW : Canonical meta link support
– Added : SWFUpload V2.2.0 B5
– Bugfix : Language typo fixes
– Bugfix : Admin Pagination fix
– Bugfix : Typo fix in widgets
– Bugfix : Init column script after document is ready
– Bugfix : More Htmlentities() for links in the a href title description
– Bugfix : Upgrade routine didn’t add sortorder to correct table (THX to Uwe)

New shortcodes for v1.2.0

I’m nearly finished the next version. I will test it during this week and release then a final beta for one week.

New in the upcoming version is thanks to the help from Simone Fumagalli, that you manually can change your thumbnails. See some example at his homepage. Also I’ve included three new shortcodes for random, recent (THX to Bernhard) and a tag cloud (Example here).

Wish you all a nice week

Let's go WordPress 2.6

The new update for NextGEN Gallery is available. It only fixes minor things, no new features… It’s a required update for the upcoming WordPress 2.6 on Monday. Please note that WP 2.6 has the new feature to move wp-content outside the classic file structure, NextGEN currently didn’t support this feature !

If you have any seldom problem with the automatic upgrade procedure, please re-upload all files per FTP before you post a request at the forums (and only there please).

So, let’s start the countdown for iPhone 2.0 and WordPress 2.6… Have a nice weekend