are you replacing combinews with something?

Sorry about that, but you will appreciate that it is not straight forward. Instead we have provided a way to automatically post news articles about newly published albums and images.

Probably should have done this sooner, but sometimes the over-complexity of things goes over our heads.

Well depending on my time to examine this new approach, my new theme may be short lived, lol...

At least it had one version....

j/k sure to get it working if needed.

thanks for the great theme gjr! Thanks for your contributions to the zen photo community.

@gjr: GitHub takes quite a bit to get into as all version control does. But the benefit would really be more contribution and easier maintainance of your themes. Ask us if you need help. You don't need to use all bells and whistles at all for "simpler "things like themes.

The CombiNews is technically problematic and a pain to maintain for internal reasons. SInce the gallery is primarily the file system but news are not. Therefore there is a lot of stuff going on there that is outside our internal object model programming so always needs extra maintaincance. Here we have the time issue you encounter with your theme as well.

I am too a bit sad that the feature is thrown out as I did make it because it is useful. But I was convinced that it technically causes constant issues when we change things.

The new way is just a plugin that creates articles from gallery items. Not full ones but rather thumbs that point to them. You can always re-create the combined RSS feed by using the mergedRSS plugin.

Actually I find Git more difficult to maintain themes with my workflow, guess I can't learn new tricks!

Will take a look at the new "combinews" system/plugin. Indeed a shame. With the old Combinews Zenphoto could actually function like a photoblog if wanted.

I won't try to convince as it is not that straightforward (well, it's a coder tool after all :-)).

You could do a photoblog with a dynamic album as well. One of the themes I didn't get to finish yet as mentioned above… new year, new plans…

There is really no external difference with the new method. It is just that the photo blog items are "real" news items not ones that have to be concocted each time you request the list of news articles.

So for theme designers there is no special consideration. If the user activates the plugin the articles exist and are treated normally by the theme. Thus no "if combinews ..." code needed anywhere.

Actually there is quite a difference for theme designers regading CombiNews, although an advanced one. The former "fake" CombiNews items were not real but were the objects of the gallery item chosen.

So you had a lot more flexible possible control about what to display how. You could use the full set of object methodes on each if needed to create your onw custom display. That is possibly what gjr did (haven't looked at the theme itself yet).