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| shiva |
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  Registered Member #1808 Joined: Posts: 3 | First off, thank you. It was a case of very fortunate timing as well. I decided to try other cms scripts, because lets face it, e107 has the most complete collection of ugly themes, and at the time, there wasn't a gallery that fit my very specific needs. I ended up at the plugins page by accident today, and the first thing I saw was your listing, with those two magic words One: auto batch creation of not just images but categories based on a uploaded folder structure (even the big boys don't do that for some strange reason) I have a very large image archive, tens of thousands of images sorted into thousands of files, so you can understand why I didn't want to be typing into a database. :) Two: Support for BMP files. Believe it or not, I must have downloaded 40 odd gallery programs, I don't remember a single one that supported bmp files that had batch categories. Most of them didn't support bmp at all (not including flash, which doesn't support bmp period) I just installed e107, and popped in your plug-in. Here's some quick thoughts as I start to go through it... I ended up installing through ftp, as I got a error through the standard e107, a missing file error. When I installed, and went to the confiq screen, the file went 404 and pointed to a hard drive location. I had 'Redirect all requests to site URL" set to on, switching that off fixed the problem. Not too sure if that is a e107 bug or not, can't remember if that happened when I used it before. The instructions were very good, and you don't know how grateful I am after using Joomla, and getting things like a ftp file manager with no instructions at all. Most extension/module/plug-in authors give basic instructions if at all, and as my long distance mind reading skills are lacking, I usually end up deleting them before I get too frustrated. Now some suggestions. I've been doing websites for 10 years, and after the last week, becoming very familiar with galleries and their features... :) The one thing I have noticed is the thumbs. A couple of my images in my test load didn't generate thumbs at all, so they show as blank on the gallery page. I would suggest a "recreate thumbs" feature button, or especially as a part of a drop box that you can do by folder as well as global. Looking at the thumb folder, I notice that the two problem images were gif and png, and that the images in the thumbs folder were a bit strange. In my test, I have two png images: ramp_decal.png, target_decals.png ramp_decal.png appears as a thumb, the other does not. Looking in the root thumbs folder, both problem thumbs are blank image files, 219 and 429 b Looking in the category thumbs folder, this is what is listed there: 100x100-ramp_decal.png 4.42 kb Mon Apr 05 2010, 08:13PM 100x100-target_decals.png 11.38 kb Mon Apr 05 2010, 08:13PM 50x50-ramp_decal.png 1.44 kb Mon Apr 05 2010, 08:11PM 80x80-ramp_decal.png 3.12 kb Noticed this in the gif and jpg folders (jpg displayed both images fine) the BMP, oddly enough, just created one thumb each for the two files. To fix this, or get the thumbs to regenerate, I would guess delete the metadata file and then reload the gallery page? It would be a nice feature to have the system show a tiny thumb of the file instead of the jpg icon in front of each file listing in the admin. That way, you would know the thumbs are generated and displaying properly. Second idea is to reindex (regenerate) a folder or entire gallery through admin. I suspect that easygallery does it when a member views a page for the first time, but other galleries can take a long time doing that, a couple times I had a server burb, and some people are just too impatient, especially first time visitors to a website. I love the simple style of this system, but it's too simple as well. It's very plain, and though I don't know what new features you have planned, and I haven't started hacking the files yet, it needs a bit of sizzle to the steak so to speak. The way the categories are listed on the gallery main page are easy to miss, and very basic in appearance. The ability to add a category description and a category icon directly through admin would be very nice, and as personal preference, I would display the main categories as a vertical list with icons/descriptions. I know this is pretty early with this plug-in, so sorry if I bring up things you already have planned. Sorry for the novel as opposed to a simple post as well, I do ramble a bit. Considering how many folders and images I will be putting in, it will be a nice test though. Thanks once again for the great plug-in | ||
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