Photonic Version 2.75 – Spotlight and Cron

Posted on September 22, 2021
Categories Plugin Releases

I released version 2.75 of Photonic on Monday (20th September), after a hiatus of 3+ months. While the gap was quite long, it was mainly because the plugin has been very stable, and I have been actively providing support on the support forum.

As it happens, I did not publish a change log for the last few versions, so I will attempt to do a catch-up change log here.

  1. New Features
    1. Spotlight lightbox
      When I did my last major redesign for version 2.60, one lightbox script that I was very keen to support was Spotlight. When you look at the gamut of lightbox scripts, there is great variety in terms of jQuery lightboxes (Fancybox, Swipebox, LightGallery, Magnific etc.). By contrast, the plain JS lightboxes are less feature rich, and the better looking ones are bulky (PhotoSwipe, which is a monster, or LightGallery). Spotlight hits a fantastic sweet spot – beautiful, feature-rich, and light. Unfortunately, back in November 2020, Spotlight had no video support. But recently Spotlight added video support and so, it finally makes its way to the list. So Photonic now has support for a whopping 17 lightbox scripts (6 pure JS, 11 jQuery). Paid or free, this is hands-down the most extensive list for any lightbox plugin.
    2. Auto-Reminders for Expiring Tokens
      A few months back Facebook put in an absurd change that prevented non-business applications from automatically renewing their credentials for Instagram access. This resulted in users suddenly seeing errors on their pages, only to realize that the error was caused due to expired credentials / tokens. I have added a bit of code to send you a warning 10 days in advance if your tokens are expiring.
  2. Bug Fixes
    The following items have been fixed since version 2.71:

    1. Flickr photosets (albums) were not showing the right URL in some cases.
    2. The title widths for the square thumbs layout were not resizing when the “More” button was being clicked.
    3. The “Title position” option was not working for Google Photos albums.
    4. The Swipebox option to “Enable Bars on Mobile” was not working.
    5. The “Slide up on hover” title style was not doing a true slide-up. This was fixed according to the patch provided by WP user @nicegamer7.

Hope you enjoy this release!