Photonic Version 2.11 – JavaScript Optimization and Bug Fixes

Posted on November 26, 2018
Categories Plugin Releases

I have released version 2.11 of Photonic with the following changes:

  1. JavaScript Optimization
    When Photonic started out in September 2011 it only had support for two lightboxes – Colorbox and Fancybox. About a month later I added support for PrettyPhoto, and then for a long period of time I didn’t add anything else. About 4 years later I added support for Swipebox, and I haven’t looked back since then, adding multiple lightboxes and amping up the capabilities of each script. During this process though, the core JavaScript file for the plugin kept getting bigger and bigger. Finally when I added support for PhotoSwipe last month I realized how big the JavaScript had become, and at that point I had to take stock and do some rewriting.

    So, in this version I broke down the core JavaScript and primarily separated each lightbox script into its own file. The net result was a reduction in size of almost 45%!

  2. Bug Fixes
    1. In the previous release I had made a change to have Flickr calls within a collection be executed in parallel. This had a side-effect: the sort order of albums in a collection stopped being respected. This should be fine now.
    2. There was an undetected bug since a long time: Instagram image sizes were being hardcoded, resulting in weird displays. This has been addressed.
    3. The interactive gallery creation flow had a bug that was causing it to crash for PHP versions < 5.5. This too should be fixed now.
  3. A small change I have made is to make the “display link” for Flickr be a little more “specific”. E.g. If a photo is in an album its link in Flickr will be specific to that album instead of the user’s photostream

Hope you enjoy this release. As always, if you are enjoying the use of Photonic please leave me a good word as a plugin review.