New to ZenPhoto, looks like a great program with lots of effort & time already expended.

A question that I've not seen answered: are there any themes that show the Desc/comment/caption for the images when being shown in a slide show?

Thanks,
Bob Miers

Description and caption (=title) are supported by the slideshow if enabled. It has however a fixed layout you can change a bit using CSS. For real custom layouts you have to build your own slideshow. The slideshow plugin currently uses this script: http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/ Even easier is the successor Cycle2 (plugin based on that in the works).

I don't remember offhand if third party themes have custom slideshows and if how they look. We don't have that much current themes so I suggest to try some.

acrylian:
Thanks for your quick reply. Just to be certain that we are on the same page (no pun intended). The images with captions does show up on the slide option where the user has to click to advance. My desire is to have the same effect in the automatic mode. If this is part of the supported themes, point me to the option that I need to select.

Thanks, Bob Miers

The slideshow is a plugin and therefore basically theme independent except the slideshow page required and unless you add extra css for styling.

It has two modes the cycle slideshow and the colorbox overlay slideshow. The 2nd does only show titles as the colorbox does not support more (cycle and colorbox are just scripts by others we use).

Best is you try it. Our site does not use it itself but here is a demo of the standard cycle slideshow: http://zenphoto.maltem.de/album2/Cosmos05.jpg.html (click on the link below). Thoes images do not have descriptions but otherwise they would be below the image.

A FYI... on the Extension tab (list #2)of the site the entry for gSlideshow March 7 2013 Info/download(external) button returns a 404 page error.

Yep, the developer has reworked his website and it is currently not available for download anyway.

acrylian:
Once again I want to thank you for your patience with someone who is just starting using ZenPhoto. I have been on the support end of products myself, so I know the frustrations that can arise. I do appreciate you diligence in providing support. Keep up the good work!
I have two things I want to discuss.

1 – I am using the latest version of XAMPP (installed with all defaults) and the current version of ZenPhoto. I spent a bit of time getting the Zen setup to run. I kept getting errors at the MySQL database setup. I was using “Localhost” as the server in the database setup area. As a workaround, I manually setup the database using XAMPP.

Later, I wanted to make sure that everything was correct so I went deleted the XAMPP install and started over. I was still having the same problem creating the data base. Just by chance I substituted “127.1.1.0” for the server address and the setup completed correctly. I’m not absolutely sure that this is repeatable. I’ll try again in a few days and let you know.

2 – I’m still learning ZenPhoto, so bear with me. I copied the code from the User Guide (http://www.zenphoto.org/news/integration-with-existing-sites-and-other-cms) and created a standalone *.php file. I then made sure that my php/ZenPhoto structure was the same as outlined in the comments.

I added a couple of php variable to look at the SERVERPATH and WEBPATH values. They appeared to me to be correct. Then I used phpDesigner8 to single step through the code. Passing through several includes everything seemed OK until I get to the first three lines of global-definations.php i.e.

1: Zenphoto technically could create a database on setup but most servers/hosts don't allow it. So you have to create the database first as noted here: http://www.zenphoto.org/news/installation-and-upgrading

What you need to enter as the db name and database host depends on the host used. On XAMPP probably that is indeed "localhost". I don't know XAMPP directly as I am on Mac using MAMP.

2: $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] is defined by the server itself. It is a so called "super global" variable: http://php.net/manual/de/reserved.variables.server.php.

I haven't tried that "plugin way" for quite some time (in "real life" I never used it at all). It for sure does not work with some CMS as noted. Btw, I don't know phpDesigner8 and what it does.
Easier ist most always to just style a theme to match a site.

1: Zenphoto WILL setup the database if the database permissions allow that. But as acrylian said, almost no hosting site allows that. As to if you installation does, you will have to check that out.

1 & #2: Unfortunately if you are going to "do it yourself" you will have to learn the ropes. I have never tired XAMP, but WAMP certainly sets the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] up to point to the server's host URL.

Thanks fellows.
FYI, phpDesign8 is a php IDE environment. I believe that it has its own version of php embeded within. That may be the source of my HTTP_HOST problems.
I'm using (Windows based) XAMPP on WIN8.1 with the default setups.
The site that I'm working on is inside a folder within htdocs (woodmereassociates05).
When I run my test file(ZenPhoto's code which I named "embedIntoWEBpage.php") from a desktop shortcut almost everything works. What I don't see the the image itself. What I see for the image is a icon with "ZP and red X". I added some additional echo statements to show some of the variables. The text that displays is:
SERVERPATH: C:/xampp/htdocs/WoodmereAssociates05/zenphoto
WEBPATH: localhost
HTTP_HOST: [localhost]
SERVER_NAME: [localhost]

This example will show a pre-defined image. Really, almost any theme related actions could be done here.
AlbumName: album/WAR
225gila-_front_002
images (0)

Visit the actual gallery from which this image was extracted.

Interesting: when I click on the "Visit the actual gallery" line I am redirected to the proper album and I can see the images therein.

My ultimate goal is to replace an Adobe Flash (since Adobe has chosen to no longer support Flash on Android devices) file that displays the photos & caption text for this site. The flash file is currently being created by the site owner (who is not a programer) using a program called CoffeeCup Photo Gallery.
If your interested, the one page can be viewed at: http:://woodmereassociates.com/listings.html.

Thanks again for bearing with me.
Bob Miers

Yes, Flash is out now as not only Android but also the popular iOS devices don't support it. Other than for animations you don't need it as we have HTML5 now (well, we need flash fallback for some older browser).

So you IMHO don't need to call anything via AJAX. Use a web capable player like mediaelement or jplayer (ZP has plugins for both, on official and one half official).
http://mediaelementjs.com
http://jplayer.org
Both sites also provide good overview tables what browser can play what.

If phpDesign8 is an IDE it is probably not its built PHP that runs on your local server. We use Netbeans plus virtual servers like WAMP or in my case MAMP. At least for me it works out of the box.

ZP and red X is what you get when image rendering fails. There should be error log messages somewhere on that. Could be memory limits or some issue with the image itself.

I'm not sure I am following this conversation. Is this error only happening when you try to load the image from your "plugin" code?

Anyway, one thing to do is look at the HTML for the ``. See if you can use that link directly in the browser address bar. Is the link an "i.php?...." link?

Thanks again fellows:
Had to get ready for the ice storm headed for south Texas today so didn't work on project yesterday afternoon.
I cleaned up the log files and then re-ran the User Guide code again. Got an error that indicated something wrong with the image name, so went to database and deleted that image. Then cut'n'pasted the next image and pasted in the the $imageName = '210_saguaro.jpg'; line and re-ran the code. Got the following error entry
{3212:Thu, 23 Jan 2014 14:54:33 GMT}

USER NOTICE: Bad album object parameter to newImage(210_saguaro.jpg) in C:\xampp\htdocs\WoodmereAssociates05\zenphoto\zp-core\class-image.php on line 44

trigger_error called from newImage (class-image.php [44])

from embedIntoWEBpage.php [40]

Went to the class-image.php code and looked...it appears that if (!$quiet) was executed....
So question is: where do I look now?

Bob Miers

4ia

FYI, all of the images have been uploaded to database using the HTML upload as supplied with ZenPhoto.

You should never delete an image in the database. Zenphoto is file system based os actually deleting the image within the album within /albums is better. Then run the "refresh database" utility so ZP can update the database to the images that are actually there (it does on the fly but only on request, e.g. if the image is visited via front or back end).

Probably now your embed script is calling an image that is not there anymore.

I misspoke. I removed the image using ZenPhoto/admin/albums/WAR (my album title)/images/ put a check mark in the bulk action for that image 0NLY and then did the bulk action. I now have done the refresh as you suggested. Reran the php code again and checked the album once again. There were 2 images there as there should be. Anyway here is the error log:
{912:Thu, 23 Jan 2014 16:03:42 GMT}

USER NOTICE: Bad album object parameter to newImage(210_saguaro.jpg) in C:\xampp\htdocs\WoodmereAssociates05\zenphoto\zp-core\class-image.php on line 44

trigger_error called from newImage (class-image.php [44])

from embedIntoWEBpage.php [40]

Would you suggest that I reinstall XAMPP and ZenPhoto to get a fresh start?

Bob Miers

The error, whatever the cause is in your script embedIntoWEBpage.php, so pretty hard for us to diagnose.

The error says that what you passed as the album was not an album object, so the source of the error will most likely be where you instantiated that album object.