Photonic Version 1.29

Posted on November 25, 2012
Categories Plugin Releases

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.