Apologies for the long wait after my last post. Work has been brutal, and after 16-hour workdays I have had scarcely any time for myself or my family, let alone Photonic or Suffusion.

This version of Photonic was supposed to have a lot more stuff than it does, mainly pagination, but due to the sudden explosion of my workload, this is all I can deliver this time:

1. I added support for the Thickbox library. Thickbox doesn’t play well with JQuery Tooltip, so if you plan on using Thickbox, bear in mind that your titles might not appear in the lightbox if you are using tooltips. Unfortunately since Thickbox is distributed with WP, I didn’t have any leeway in terms of customizing it.
2. There was some incompatibility between Photonic and themes from Themify. Specifically it was not possible to use Photonic’s lightbox selection, and clicking on album thumbnails didn’t show the popup panel. I have added some workarounds in Photonic to address this (though ideally this should have been handled by Themify)
3. I have added the capability to exclude password-protected galleries from displaying in SmugMug.
4. In yet another innovative feature, I added support for an alternative shortcode. Photonic is set up to use the [gallery] shortcode by default. However your theme might be overriding this shortcode too, or maybe you have another plugin that has its plans for this shortcode. So now you have the option to specify what name you want to use for the shortcode, and that shortcode is yours. Bear in mind, that if you use this feature, using the [gallery] shortcode for Photonic will no longer work. More importantly, if you stop using Photonic, your new shortcode will show up all over the place – something that doesn’t happen if you stick with the [gallery] shortcode.

Hope you like this release. Photonic doesn’t get anywhere close to the amount of love that Suffusion does despite being a unique product, so it would be great if you left your reviews on the official WP site.

I have just released version 1.41 of Photonic with the following updates:

1. One of the most popular plugins in WP is JetPack, and it also happens to be one that messes up other plugins quite a lot. I didn’t have JetPack active for a while since unknown to me the last time I had tried to update JetPack I wasn’t successful. But apparently having some modules of JetPack activated, like “Publicize”, would cause the galleries to be evaluated twice, resulting in messed up global variables for Photonic. To cut a long story short, login buttons were not appearing. While JetPack is the culprit here, I understand that the 800lb gorillas are the toughest to dislodge, hence I made some changes in Photonic to get around this.
2. I have added support for the ids parameter for the native shortcode in the “Add Media” panel.
3. I have added options to control the display of the thumbnail, title and photo count in SmugMug album headers

Hope you enjoy this release. As usual, if you like Photonic please leave a review for it.

Every year around this time I have a new release of Suffusion. This year though, it is going to be a new release of Photonic. Maybe there will be one more before the New Year, depending on how much my family manages to push me out of the house.

This version of Photonic has the following highlights:

1. I rewrote the Picasa Processor to be DOM-based instead of event-based. While that is techno-speak, not entirely relevant to you as a user, what it means is that I was able to make a few things more elegant and easy for me to achieve. So …
2. … There is now an option to let users display the image title instead of the description in Picasa. To use it, go to Photonic → Settings → Picasa → Picasa Settings → Photo titles.
3. Nested collections in Flickr were not working correctly. A warning was showing up, and collections were getting repeated. This should be working fine now.
4. I have also fixed an erroneous link for the Flickr collections’ thumbnails. Clicking on them should now take you to the right page
5. Picasa thumbnails in the popup window now have the same dimensions as those in the main page.

Hope you like this release. I have some pretty big plans for the plugin, like extending support to Zenfolio and Facebook, adding the capability to use more lightbox libraries etc. You can rate / review Photonic at the official WP page.

I have been on a roll with respect to Photonic the last few week, only punctuated by the Thanksgiving weekend here in the US.

The latest version of the plugin has the following updates:

1. The 500px.com component now has support for collections. However, please note that the Collections API in 500px.com is very quirky. It requires authentication, but then it only lets a user see his own collections after logging in. In other words, there way no way the API would let you show all your collections by a single call to a visitor – instead the visitor will see his collections after authentication. I have logged this as an issue, but I have no idea when it will get resolved. Naturally there was no point in offering such functionality.
   So what have I provided? I have built the capability to show a named collection. You could use this kind of an invocation, and it will show the photos in the specified collection:

   [gallery type='500px' view='collections' view_id='xyz']

   In the above, xyz is the collection id. Instead of view='collections' you could use view='sets'. They are synonymous in 500px.com parlance. How do you know the collection id? There is no programmatic way to do so. However you can see the URL of a photo in a collection, e.g. http://500px.com/photo/7206122?from=set/265673, and pick the portion after “from=set/”. So here the collection id is 265673. This is a photo from Michael Stuart, a Photonic user who has graciously consented to let me showcase his photos for the 500px.com demos.

2. The prior versions had an issue with authenticating in 500px.com, which I have taken care of.
3. I have added the capability to show fewer pictures on an archive page than in the single page/post. You can configure the settings from Settings → Photonic → Generic Options → Layouts.
4. I have changed the Flickr module to be predominantly PHP-based, moving away from JavaScript. The reason for this switch is that the JS was causing some conflicts with some plugins. Additionally having a PHP-based solution will let you make use of caching much better.

That’s it for this release. My workload is increasing again from tomorrow, so updates will not be as frequent or heavy as they have been the last couple of weeks.

I just released version 1.26 of Photonic, capping a few weeks of hectic development. First was the responsive version of Suffusion, then support for Font Squirrel in FontMeister, and now, OAuth2 support in Photonic for authentication in Picasa.

So this version of Photonic features:

1. Support for private photos in Picasa
   This was a feature that took me quite some time and a few aborted attempts to develop. While Flickr, 500px.com and SmugMug use OAuth1 for authentication, Picasa uses OAuth2. The mechanisms for authentication differ, and it took me quite some time to figure out how to work with OAuth2. Thanks to Marcel Bokhorst, a suffurer, whose Add Links to Facebook plugin uses OAuth2 authentication. Marcel was gracious to help me with some OAuth2 concepts, which I have been able to put to use here.
   To enable private photo setup for Picasa:
   1. Go to the Google API Console.
   2. Create a “Client ID for web applications”. For the “Redirect URI” remember to include the URL of your WP homepage. E.g In my case the URI was http://aquoid.com/news.
   3. Go to Settings → Photonic → Picasa → Picasa Settings, and put in your new Client ID and Client Secret.
   4. On the same screen enable private photo access and save.

   Now when you visit a page with Picasa photos, it will show a box to log in. Without logging in that page will show all photos with public access, but once you log in you will be able to see private photos as well, to which you have been given access.

2. Ability to show single photos in 500px.com
   Just like single photos in Flickr, you can now show single photos from 500px.com. The syntax is simple:
   

   [gallery type='500px' view='photos' view_id='4041547']

   This will show a single photo. The above shows a photo by Colin:
   

   Some features that you are trying to access may be visible to logged in users of 500px.com only. Please login if you want to see them.

   Login

   Enjoying the sunshine

   

   A pretty girl sunning her self in a park in Madrid.
3. More skins for Colorbox
   I have added a few other Colorbox skins. You can pick any that you like, from Settings → Photonic → Generic Options → JS Library Settings.

The reason I am excited about this release is that I can now consider integrating Instagram and potentially Facebook.

As usual, if you like this release, please do consider leaving a review for Photonic.