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.
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Hello!
A good feature, would be a multiple account configuration, as it is now, kPicasa only imports public albums from one picasa account, isnt it?
It would be nice if it could handle more, so we can upload more then 1gb of free photos… just sharing another user´s account… and from those, like my baseball team, that have photos spread all over different accounts…
Thanks!
I think I’ ll try to hack your plugin, if you allow me to do so… I’ll e-mail you to talk better about that, is that ok?
Best regards!
April 24th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Confirmed… kPicasa Gallery doesn’t play well with AddThis social bookmarking plug in. Just thought you’d like to know since AddThis seems to be pretty popular across the web on blogs.
With AddThis activated all I see on page I added for kPicasa was the KPICASA_GALLERY text where the gallery should have been. When I disabled the AddThis plug in the gallery comes back. Any ideas? Love kPicasa… love the AddThis. May have to opt for AddThis if I can’t find a way around it.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Thanks Craig!!! I’ll look into this.
When you guys report a specific plugin, it really helps.
Guillaume
May 1st, 2008 at 3:53 am
Hi,
Great plugin. Was using the older version and then upgraded to workpress 2.5, so thought i would update kpicasa as well. Unfortunately now its stopped working, giving me just the error “no album found”.
I’m using the same picasa username as always so can’t quite understand it!
Any help very much appreciated.
Andy
May 1st, 2008 at 7:15 am
If you try the old version of kPicasa you had, does it work?
May 1st, 2008 at 9:51 am
Version 0.1.3 works fine. Just downgraded.
Thanks - happy to help further if you want more info
May 1st, 2008 at 10:20 am
Well at least you got it working again. I’ll browse the code to find an explanation!
May 4th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Hi
I have been using your wonderful plugin to show my Picasa albums.
Yesterday I switched web hosts and suddenly Highslide is not working.
Can you please throw some light as to where the trouble might be.
Thanks and regards,
S.K
May 11th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Hello,
this plugin is something I was looking for. Thank you.
Only one problem is that I cannot get Highslide and Lightbox to get working.
There are appropriate classes in the links but somehow engines cannot start (browser is opening image in separate tab/window). Installing separate plugins for displaying engines didn’t helped.
Any ideas? (before I start messing with the plugin code)
Best wishes,
A.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:41 am
I seem to be running into an error when using your plugin. However, I can use an older version av the php4-mod (though not the latest update). I have Wordpress 2.5.1 and I have PHP5 enabled. So far there’s no issue. But when I install your Kpicasa-plugin and activate it, I get the following errormessage:
Warning: file_get_contents(http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/henrik.sundholm/album/henrik.sundho
lm?kind=photo) [function.file-get-contents]:failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found in /customers/equil.net/equil.net/httpd.www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/kpicasa-galle
ry/kpg.class.php on line 424
Error: kPicasa Gallery tried to connect to
Picasa Web Albums using file_get_contents()
and failed. Your web host is probably blocking
outgoing requests.
I get the exact same error if I activate the latest version of the php4-modified plugin. I’ve asked my webhost if they’ve got a clue, and the only thing they could say is that the Picasa-link in the errormessage seems to be invalid: it doesn’t go anywhere.
Got a solution for a n00b?
May 14th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Hi Henrik, if you were using an older version and simply upgraded the PHP files, you now need to change the way kPicasa is called. Since a few versions now, you simply need to call: KPICASA_GALLERY. No more parenthesis unless you want some advanced options.
May 14th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Thanks! It works beautifully now.
http://www.equil.net/?page_id=470
May 14th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Also if unable to display effects try turning off all plugins and change your theme (as in my case, dunno why; didn’t use any scripts other than google ones)