Status update and feature requests

April 12th, 2008 38 Comments »

Since the first version, kPicasa Gallery has gained a lot of stability and maturity. I want to thank every one of you who submitted feedback, I could have never done all this without your help.

As it is still not perfect, I get feature requests by email and in post comments. Here’s a list of what has been asked:

  • Display the latest photos in the sidebar/footer/etc. After searching some more, it seems that Picasa provides a RSS feed with the latest additions. I’ll see how I can fit this in.
  • Select the size of the thumbnails. David has already done the work for this, won’t be a problem.
  • Resolve incompatibilities with other plugins. Although I try my best to make kPicasa play nice with other plugins, it seems that there are plugins out there that can’t co-exist with kPicasa (Google Analytics for example). I tried to contact the author to get some help figuring out if it’s my plugin or their plugin that’s not being nice to the other.
  • Tableless design. This has been asked a few times, but I was never able to make it work as good as with tables. I’m not great with CSS so unless someone wants to help, I’m afraid it’s not going to happen, sorry!
  • Display the date in a different format. Won’t be a problem.
  • Choosing what fields to display. Decide if you want to display the title, location, date, description, etc. Pretty much anything that’s available in the RSS feed that Picasa provides. Won’t be a problem either.
  • Support visitors who don’t use Javascript. I though <noscript> had been deprecated, but no! I’ll add this to the next release.

My girlfriend is going on a 6-week trip in early May, I’m pretty sure I won’t have time to touch kPicasa before then. So keep an eye for a new release in about a month from now.

I’ve had two or three people emailing me about kPicasa not working at all. My first suggestion is to turn off all your plugins and only enable kPicasa Gallery. If it works, it means there’s a conflict with another plugin. Enable them one by one and *please* let me know the one that’s causing problems.

Some other people contacted me because kPicasa didn’t work either. They gave me the link to their page and everything worked fine. It seems that there was some sort of caching on their site and that was the source of the problem. kPicasa tries to use the built-in caching engine and I’m not 100% sure how it works under the hood. Could be that engine, could be kPicasa.

One other user gave me access to his files because kPicasa wasn’t loading. It turned out that his particular PHP configuration changed the way include() looked for files to include. Fortunately I was able to patch his installation and I think it’s worth including this change in the next release.

Last but not least, a lot of people have asked why sometimes, there’s a download prompt instead of the Lightbox thing. The problem lies with Lightbox – it only activate itself when all the thumbnails are loaded. So when someone clicks on a thumbnail really early the page load, Lightbox isn’t on yet. Guillaume Petitclerc has posted a workaround in the comments, I’ll check it out and put it in kPicasa if it’s a good solution.

One last thing, I still haven’t tried WordPress 2.5. I don’t think there should be any problem since kPicasa only uses really basic WordPress functions, but I would like to hear from people running WP2.5.