Photonic Version 1.35

It surely looks like Suffusion’s loss if Photonic’s gain! I have pushed in the latest version of Photonic, which has some nice additions:

1. Instagram Support:
   This was something that didn’t take long to develop. Even with my workload I managed to do most of the work last weekend and finished the rest this weekend. Instagram is now supported to the extent it is possible to support it! You can display photos that you post, in addition to popular photos. You can also search for photos by location and tags. In addition you can list out the users who follow you or are followed by you. The complete Instagram demo has been made available. The demo page is currently being worked on, however you can see all the examples in action there.
2. Helpers:
   I pulled Photonic into its own menu item. Rather than nesting under Settings in your dashboard, Photonic is a new tab on the left. This has helped me create a new “Helpers” page for the back-end. Therein you can find things such as your Flickr ID or Instagram ID, without having to scramble across the web.
3. This was an unreported bug: for authenticated users clicking on a Flickr Gallery thumbnail wasn’t showing a popup with the gallery photos. I have fixed this.
4. I have also added the capability to let your external URLs (such as Flickr or Instagram URLs) in a new tab. You can configure the setting from Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Generic Settings → External Link Handling.

I now have a pretty good framework in place for Photonic. If there is any source that supports OAuth 1 or OAuth 2, it should be fairly easy to add the nuts and bolts in place for it. The tricky part is obviously handling the galleries, photos etc.

One piece of good news is that I now have access to Zenfolio. So that is the next source in my line of sight is Zenfolio. The bad thing about Zenfolio is that it doesn’t use OAuth 1 or OAuth 2; it uses its own authentication. That makes things a bit more challenging.

Another source obviously on my radar is Facebook. However the preponderance of Facebook plugins makes me wonder if I can add value in that area. I will also be focusing on the social aspects of the plugin, like letting users share photos on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, among other things. In addition I will focus on more layout options, and extending Lightbox support to other non-GPL scripts.

Before I close, I would like to thank all of you for your support in response to my previous post. I shall be responding to each of you individually. The thing is, Suffusion has reached a point beyond which new features are hard to add. However I will work to keep the theme up to date, and if any new feature strikes me as being worthy of development I will definitely work on it. I will also work with you on the support forum to help resolve issues.

If you like my work, I encourage you to rate and review it – making money has never been a goal of my open source projects, but garnering your goodwill definitely has. Photonic’s review page is here, Suffusion’s here and FontMeister’s here.