I have pushed out version 1.20 of Photonic, with one big feature: authentication.

Almost all providers of online services offer some sort of authentication mechanism, typically OAuth. This includes Twitter, Flickr, Google, Facebook etc. A lot of these platforms have in fact moved away from proprietary authentication mechanisms to OAuth to support third-party integration. In the simplest terms, OAuth is a protocol that lets users access protected content without having to specify their user name and password.

So far Photonic has been built for Flickr, Picasa, 500px.com and SmugMug. I have added authentication / authorization as follows:

1. Flickr: Fully implemented. This will let you share private / protected photos across your network. Check out the authentication demo.
2. 500px.com: Fully implemented, but there isn’t much benefit you gain by setting it up. Basically 500px.com offers a total of 3 types of web services (Photos, Users and Blogs), of which Photonic implements one (Photonic), which doesn’t need OAuth. Note that at this point 500px.com doesn’t support private / protected photos.
3. SmugMug: Here is where I am unhappy. Their OAuth API is amazingly comprehensive, yet I couldn’t extract much mileage simply from a photo viewing perspective. I originally thought it would let me show password-protected photos, but I had no such luck. I have posted on their forum and hopefully I will have a solution soon for handling this. Anyway, I have built out the authentication capabilities, but I will have to think about how to harness the capabilities better in a subsequent release.

Unfortunately Picasa is ahead of the curve in this regard, which is a surprise given that their API is the weakest, hence the paucity of plugins as good as Photonic for Picasa. Picasa uses OAuth 2.0, while the others use OAuth 1.0. Given my workload these days I wasn’t able to add OAuth 2.0 support to Photonic, but it is something I shall do very soon.

Happy authentication!

I have released version 1.11 of Photonic. The following are the changes for this release:

1. I have combined some JavaScript files to save server round-trips.
2. I have deleted some redundant JS files.
3. I have also added the capability to use a default gallery type. This way if you decide to use only Flickr photos on your site, you could set your default gallery type to be Flickr and leave out the type parameter in your shortcode invocation.
4. I have added support for displaying single photos in Flickr. Check out the demo page.

I will be making some more enhancements to this plugin once I sort out how to keep the many balls I am juggling all in the air.

I just released a small patch for Photonic in version 1.10. SmugMug albums, upon clicking were not resulting in a popup. This should be working fine now.

Suffusion Beta Testers, please provide your feedback on the beta version!! I have only received one person’s response regarding it.

A Happy New Year to all users of Suffusion and Photonic!

This is a quick release for Photonic, to address the following:

1. Google changed the Picasaweb API to return a maximum image size of 512px. I have made changes in the code to override that.
2. I have updated the code to use the latest WP 3.3 functionality. This should be transparent from your point of view – only the workings behind the scene have changed.
3. IE users of the Fancybox script within Photonic would be presented with “Not found” messages in their log. I have rectified this.

There were a few changes requested for SmugMug, like supporting protected albums, buying etc. I haven’t been able to add that, but I will do so pretty soon.

I have released version 1.07 of Photonic. The following are the changes in this version:

1. I have added SmugMug support to the plugin. You can see some demo pages here. Note that the plugin currently supports unauthenticated calls. Also, you cannot use it for protected albums. In a subsequent release I will be expanding the access further.
2. There was a request to suppress the file names that were being shown in Picasa in case of a missing title. I have addressed that.

Please let me know what you think.