I upgraded to trunk yesterday and have been fiddling with it for a good number of hours now.
I believe that the most important step for zenphoto now, is to make image flipping smooth (like slim/grey/light/dark/thick-box, simpleviewer or the tricasa hack) by default. By default I mean that it must integrate nicely into the zenphoto structure of index.php / albums.php / image.php - which only tricasa manages (somewhat) so far.
Thus I integrated tricasa in the Default theme to see what needs to be done.
[b]This works perfectly well: [/b]
Images are preloaded (and flipping between them is nothing short of impressive!).
Existing image descriptions are kept in sync with the images as we flip through.
[b]These are the problems (and bugs): [/b]
[list]
[*]URL remain constant.
(refreshing and linking wont work properly)
[]Tricasa always flips from the first image no matter what image you actually start at.
[]Comments, tags and EXIF remains static and is never updated.
(eg. you'll always comment the first image you visit in a album, even if you're currently viewing another.)
[*]The image container size is static, so smaller images won't be centered.
(my default size is 800x600. A 600x800 image will be noticably missplaced at the far left side of the container)
[/list]
The solution would be to make index.php an entirely ajaxified beast. With tricasa, we have images and descriptions fed to the page in realtime. If we had comments and EXIF data delivered like that too, we'd practically be done already. Of course, we need to keep the comment fields in sync too - so it adds comments to the correct image. (Perhaps a hidden field holding the image ID, so the server side comment code knows where to put it?)
I don't know if fiddling with the URL is within the powers of JS - but I could live without it anyway.
So... how difficult would this be to do? Is it possible at all?
My gallery offers a fairly big sample set to see how tricasa behaves. You're free to browse around of course, but here's a few usefull links to save you time:
Album with image description
Album with image comments.
Here's a fix for issue #2; that tricasa isn't aware of where we enter an album.
Quote:function preLoadLores() {
fgdisplay = $('#imagemain1');
bgdisplay = $('#imagemain2');
current = ;
albumImages[current] = createImage(current, 2);
albumImages[current].onload = null;
albumImages[current].src = images[current][2];
var cont = document.getElementById('imagecontainer');
cont.style.width = images[current][3]+'px';
cont.style.height = images[current][4]+'px';
preloadAround(current);
}(code-markup on bbpress is a joke...)
I've added support for reading/writing comments and keeping the EXIF-data in sync. You can download my Tricasa enabled default theme (v. 0.1). Just visit my gallery for a demo.
You'll have to replace one of zenphotos core files (functions-controller.php) - I added some logic to allow you to post a comment to any image ID, not just the $zp_current_image. This is of course necessary for adding comments to the correct image. (I'm hoping this "patch" might get accepted into core proper?)
The theme is only modified in two ways: it's made to allow larger default image dimensions (800x600), and the image.php it tricasified. (oh, and I believe I removed the subalbum RSS-links, since it doesn't work properly anyway).
[b]Still left to do:[/b]
[list]
[]Center smaller images in the image container.
[]Keep the tags in sync.
[*]Images that are larger than the default dimensions, should be thickbox links for full display.
[/list]
[b]What really needs to be done:[/b]
[list]
[]Populate comments, EXIF, tags and description via AJAX.
[]Write and update comments, EXIF, tags and description via AJAX.
[/list]
Just a [i]slight[/i] update to this hack. You can grab the tricasa_default 0.2 here.
Changes:
added wrap-around for album browsing
disabled exif, geo and tag-data (unused bloat)
disabled auto-fire. (unused, buggy and stupid)
somewhat useable in IE.
*code cleanup. (a bit more readable now)
Once again:
This is the "default" theme with only a few modifications: better fit for larger images (800x600), minimizing page height (no footers, no RSS-icons etc), some javascript actions to link the large divs in album view. I've also disabled paging in most views.
Note:
Flipping through images works very well for visitors (... providing they're on Firefox...), but less so for administrative purposes. Do not modify the ajax fields (image description, image title, tags) after flipping to a new image. These are not kept in sync with the tricasa hack so you'll end up altering the data of the first image you visited in the album.
Mostly the same issues I ran into with my Galleria/jCarousel theme:
http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=2571
I disable paging just by setting my image and album limits per page to be very high.
I opted to not use image.php for the problems with the URLs for SEO and bookmarking and such -- the image display is done on album.php, and it use document.location.hash to change the URL for the displayed image.
Thanks for the feedback, both of you.
Using the location.hash seems to be difficult; something in the ajax-library (or otherwhere) keeps reseting in every time I flip an image.
I did however turn the end node of the bread crumb navigation to a link that's kept in sync with the tricasa-browsing; thus giving users atleast one way to find a link.
tricasa_default 0.2.1
Changes:
keeping the end-node of the bread crumb navigation in sync,
to allow users some way to link correctly.
using thumbnails instead of generating custom low-rez images
*honoring the default size setting
Perhaps this is known already, if "allow comments" is toggled off, then the images don't advance with the title. Gets stuck on the first image selected from the thumbnail page, while the title advances back/forth just fine.
Good catch!
I've updated 0.2.1 with a fix.
Changes:
*fixed: flipping works when allow_comments is off.
Now, if anyone could tell me what the hell is going on in IE when flipping between images, I'd be very happy.
Note though that IE centers images nicely. Let me know if you can get Firefox to behave as well.
Nice quick fix!
How hard is it to make the full image appear clicking on its large image, as in the default theme?
Thanks!
So, when flipping through, when I click on an image I get from the brower (Firefox & Safari):
`NOT FOUND
The requested URL /albums/.../IMG.jpg.php was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.`
The desired full image is IMG.jpg, so the .php isn't getting stripped.
Thanks!
ulfben,
Although default is already very clean, I like the even more streamlined approach you've taken (and of course the tricasa speed).
Of the elements left out (RSS, etc.), I miss the "image info" the most.
Is this hard to maintain? Could be placed somewhere else, e.g., inline to the right of image if need be.
Also, I don't use comments much, but I notice that the comment form captcha isn't working? You probably know this
Thanks!
Sweet, thanks for working on this.
The URLs need to work like this:
When on an image page, instead of linking to /albumname/imagename.jpg.php it should be something like /albumname/img#imagename.jpg, and then as was said above you can use document.locations.hash to retrieve and change that value. That's exactly how it works in Picasa Web, check it out there if you're confused.
So, what would be required is some sort of new rewrite rule for /albumname/img that would just redirect to /index.php?a=albumname&i=[anything-really] (image doesn't matter as you'll be getting it from the javascript).
Then you'll also have to update the image links in the album to use the /albumname/img#imagename.jpg instead of the /albumname/imagename.jpg.php form.
All in all not too difficult, and that should give you reliable current image, and even stuff like bookmarking and sending links should work just fine.
Quote:The desired full image is IMG.jpg, so the .php isn't getting stripped.
Sorry mate. I'm using ZenPhoto's getImageLinkURL() straight up. I don't know why it would append .php to it. Please check your settings and let me know if you find out what causes it.
Quote:I miss the "image info" [...]
It's still in there, just commented out. Check image.php in the default_tricasa folder; I believe I've commented the disabled lines. The only thing you need to think about is to offset the imgurl and fullSize-entries of the array. (eg, they're at 8 and 9 now, but will be 9 and 10 if you enable exif-data. 10 and 11 if you turn on tags too.)
The reason for turning it off is performance. Every image has EXIF-fields, and every image's data gets loaded (in full mark up form) when you enter an album (image.php). Considering how useless that data is for the vast amount of visitors, it's just rubbish to keep it. YMMV of course.
Quote:the comment form captcha isn't working
Yeah, I'll add that soon.
(soddit, blockquote is broken)
Tris - you're the one who truly understand the CSS witchcraft doing the image-flipping. Could you please take a look at my gallery in IE and see if you can find a solution to the weird behaviour when loading new images? (eg: it seems to display the low-rez image two steps back or something, while loading the new one).
Also: do you know how to have the images centered in Firefox like they are in IE?
Ok, I now "understand" the origin of the .php suffix (I wouldn't qualify as a php/apache novice, even...)
Still, I suspect a bug. I turned off mod_rewrite. I now get the error
The requested URL /albums/gallery/index.php was not found on this server.
This is quite puzzling, since I don't have this directory structure.
I have /gallery/index.php and /gallery/albums/ etc., where ZP is installed on my "gallery" directory (name chosen by me).
P.S. There's a suspicious line //assuming images are in the album folder. in index.php
Sorry, not quite familiar enough with this yet to track back...