Various suggestions

[pjdevries]

Hi Jan. Thanks once more for this great plugin. It does have some rough edges, but it's already quite usable and very promising.

I have a few suggestions. I am quite impressed by Phoca Gallery, so please take these suggestions for what they are: suggestions and no destructive criticism.

- Explicit, global control over directory and file creation permissions. I'm using suPHP in paranoid mode on my server and unless my directories and files are created with permissions 775 and 664 respectively, no images show up. Two global parameters (similar to what we had in Joomla! 1.x - Global Configuration - Server), would be perfect.

- Add formatting to and/or insert links in image descriptions. Currently the WYSIWYG editor is not enabled for image descriptions and neither is it possible to enter html directly. Also, if an image descriptions is quite large, the bottom part is covered by the navigation buttons in the detail window.

- Show image descriptions near thumbnails (in category view). Currently image descriptions are only shown in the image detail window.

- 'Use Global' for all component configuration parameters. Currently some of them (colors, font sizes, name & description lengths etc.) are local to the page and if one changes the global settings, local settings have to be adjusted manually in each and every place.

- Move multiple images to another category at once.

- Menu Item Type for single, full (detail window) size images (including description).

- Additional plugin parameter to embed full (detail window) size images in article content.

- Configurable base directory location.

- Make the display of the Menu Item Title and the Category title independent of each other, so one can show the one without necessarily showing the other. Currently, if the Menu Item Title is the same as the Title of the Category the menu item refers to, the same title is shown twice like so: "My Work - My Work". Switching off the Page Title (Menu Item - Parameters - System - Show the Page Title) is not a solution, because then neither the Menu Item Title nor the Category Title is displayed.

For me, the first suggestion is of major importance, because I can not use Phoca Gallery if that issue isn't resolved. If you do not intend to include it as a strutural option to Phoca Gallery, I welcome suggestions how to solve my problem.

Maybe some of my suggestions come from a lack of understanding or experience, in which case I apologize beforehand. I also realize that some of my suggestions could be implemented with template overrides. I hope however, they may be valuable improvements to Phoca Gallery in general.

[Jan]

Hi, thank you for your feature requests... Please let me know via e-mail, we can solve these features steb by step...

Jan

[pjdevries]

I would love to do that, but where do I send the e-mail to?

[Jan]

info@phoca.cz

[pjdevries]

Ha, yes. I just saw it on top of the PayPal page when making a donation. I'll send you the e-mail right away.

[Jan]

[wdixon]

Nice component... I am just starting to play with it... Here are some feature requests.

1) Add control over which size images are used in the various views (presently you have the control for the categories (small/medium)) - but when displaying images in a category - it is not selectable and its set to the medium size... I was trying to create 100x100 small 250x250 med, 640x480 large.... because I wanted to use 250x250 thumbs to display reasonable sized images in articles content using the gallery plug-in... But the 250x250 medium are too large for the category view (causing layout problems).... So I was hoping to use the small thumbs (~100x100) for displaying images within a category (and categories) - and then choose the medium size for article content - keeping the large size for slideshow.... If you could select thumb size for category/tree views I think it would solve my issue?

2) If you could monitor a directory tree - and automatically add the images when they appear on the server (e.g. ftp'd)… Or at least be an admin function to add new images….

3) Would be nice if the generate thumbs were a separate step in the admin access - if you are adding lots of pictures at one time - you cannot get back to the admin interface until after all the thumbs are generated.

[Jan]

1) Hi it is very variable:
100x100 - https://www.phoca.cz/phocagallery/demo/i ... llery-wine
200x200 - https://www.phoca.cz/phocagallery/demo/i ... llery-alps
both on only one site

In article, there are used the mediums (plugin takes info from default settings, so you can change for all menu links to 100x100 and only for plugins 200x200 in default settings)

2) , I know what you mean, but with this solution there will be more problems (public, unpublic, ordering, ....)
3) yes, and it depends on the user... You have a powerful function but you must know if you want to wait for doing e.g. 100 images or if your server is strong for doing it, if your webhosting CPU and RAM ist strong to create images...

Jan

[wdixon]

1) I guess I am a bit confused… My first attempts were to create the small thumbs at 100x100 and the medium ones at 250x250.
I installed the Phoca Gallery component, Gallery Tree and Gallery Plugin.
I added a menu â€" Category List â€" and I could see that changing the setting from small to medium or medium to small had the expected affect… I then set it to small and had the 100x100 images show up in the category list. All fine so far.
Then when you clicked one of the images in the category list â€" it showed images using the medium size (in my case 250x250) â€" but the images were clipped to fit in the bounding box. (Off hand I don’t know what the size of the box was â€" but maybe only 2/3 of the image was shown â€" the rest clipped. (I have since removed the thumbs and went back to smaller thumbs â€" (now I am waiting to regenerate) â€" but seem fine with the medium size at 150.
So that was the source of the question â€" how do you control which size (small or medium ) will be used? It seems you have control over the size selection for categories list but not displaying the contents of a category?


2) I realize you would get what you get with ordering, etc… but you have that exact situation with add multiple. It’s a way to add bulk pictures â€" and if you want to move them around later you can do so. I am having trouble seeing how to manage the albums when you have several hundreds to a few thousand pictures. I am coming from using g2 with gallery remote â€" but really want to move to Joomla 1.5 â€" and phoca is one of the few native 1.5 apps with promise.
3) With respect to the admin interface â€" I wasn’t suggesting that the thumbs continue to generate in the background â€" but rather adding a second step “generate thumbsâ€Â

[Jan]

1) In categories view, you can change:

- small images
- medium images

I category view, you can only display

- medium images and it depends on you which image you will use. If you want to display e.g. medium with 200x200 and you have shadow on (background border with shadow), you must change the shadow1 to shadow2... If you want to use other resolution in medium and shadow background, you must change the shadow2.gif file

3) Yes but you know this, so you can e.g. add only 30 images, and... or you can use the pagination thumbnail creating... only first x images will be created (x ... it is the number of your pagination limit) and if you want to create next images, you go to the second site

4) The HTTP redirect is there because of 30 second script limit on your server. Try to change to javascript redirect and you get no thumbnails after 30 seconds.... it is php

5) Upgrade... while upgrading you lose the SEF menu link, you must repair them (you lose the params in default settings too, but NOT the parameter component settings):
https://www.phoca.cz/phocagallery/user-m ... ex.php#a10