Photonic Version 1.62 – Slideshow Layout, Lightgallery Support, jQuery Cycle Phaseout, and Redesigned Back-End

Posted on January 31, 2017
Categories Plugin Releases

Version 1.62 of Photonic is now out. The following are included in this release:

  1. Slideshow Layout
    Up until now the native WP galleries could be displayed in a slideshow mode, by setting style='no-strip', style='strip-below' or style='strip-above'. Now you can do this for any type of gallery. Since the other galleries don’t have a style attribute, you can pass this value to the layout attribute. In addition, there is a new value it takes, strip-right, that shows a thumbnail strip to the right of the slideshow.
  2. Replacement of jQuery Cycle
    The jQuery Cycle library has been a staple of my WP projects since 2009. But while being extremely powerful, it was hard to make it work in a responsive fashion, and touch gestures were not integrated into it. The author of the plugin had released a new version, Cycle2, but Cycle2 cannot coexist with Cycle (which is used by Suffusion). Since WP yanked Suffusion from the repository, I have no means to modify it – as a matter of fact, replacing Cycle was what I was working on when Suffusion got pulled. So, rather than risk conflicts for users of Suffusion using Photonic, I figured out an alternative – a new slideshow library! I settled on Lightslider. This is a lot smaller than Cycle, it is responsive and touch-friendly out of the box, and has just 2 transition effects (fade and slide) instead of the buffet that came with Cycle.
  3. Trimmed Down Back-End
    Since the early days of Suffusion I have had a mechanism to display the back-end options, which I kept in place for Photonic as well. I finally cut the cord on that and re-styled the back-end to use native WP features. This removed the dependence on jQuery UI, which was often causing conflicts with rogue plugins. The new back-end has a different look, and reduced size and load-time.
  4. Lightgallery Lightbox
    I have added support for the Lightgallery lightbox script. This is a nice-looking but heavy script by the same author who wrote Lightslider. Feel free to give this a spin.
  5. New “Getting Started” page
    In your back-end, under Photonic you now have a linke, “Getting Started”. This is a compendium of links for high-level capabilities of the plugin.
  6. New Shortcode Attributes
    In line with the slideshow layout a bunch of new parameters have been added to the shortcode:

    1. controls – Shows “Previous” and “Next” buttons. Accepted values: show and hide
    2. caption – Overrides the caption content back-end setting for a gallery. E.g. title will always attempt show the title, even if blank, and title-desc will show a title if one exists, and a caption otherwise. Accepted values are none, title, desc, title-desc, desc-title.
    3. thumb_size and main_size – controls the sizes to be used for a gallery, overriding the thumbnail and main image sizes set in the back-end.

Have fun with this release!