Status update and feature requests
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)
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Had the php libraries updated and compiled with curl and have the tags allow_url_fopen = On and allow_url_include = On done. On the gallery page it’s producing no displayed errors but the plugin is crashing. Essentially I get a blank page after the header the page title. The side bars don’t even load.
I’m wondering if there are some setting adjustments I have to make to the php.ini file or to how the directories are assigned.
You can see the gallery at:
http://www.recidivist.org/?page_id=7
May 24th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Hi Jaime,
It would be great if you could check your PHP error logs. I’m pretty sure there will be something interesting in there.
May 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Logging config is: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
Log file shows no listed error.
If I add the line:
extension=php_curl.dll
then I get:
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/lib/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/php_curl.dll’ – /usr/lib/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/php_curl.dll: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
With allow_url_fopen = On and allow_url_include = On do I need to activate the php_curl extention?
May 27th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Hi Guillaume,
I’m very pleased with the work on kPicasa so far. I’d also be happy to help with the solutions for tableless design.
I’m not so good on PHP (although currently learning my way around it), but I’m specialised in XHTML and CSS, and I think I could easily create a solid structure and associated style sheet for these galleries.
Perhaps you could email me and we could work out the best method for me to assist?
Do you have SVN for the plugin so that all changes could be recorded?
May 27th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Jaime: PHP says it cannot find php_curl.dll in the extentions directory (which seems to be /usr/lib/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/). Make sure it’s really where the extensions are supposed to be. There’s not much else I can do to help you.
I believe you only need either cURL or allow_url_fopen.
Alex: thanks for the hand, I just wrote you an email.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:07 am
Thanks for this plugin, it looks great but I have a slight problem with WordPress 2.5.1. I have installed kPicasa in accordance with the documentation (I think) and kpicasa gallery shows in my plugin list. When I click on the kPicasa gallery item under the Settings menu, there is an error which simply states ‘Invalid plugin page’.
I have created the gallery page, but when I click on it, I get the following message: Error: you must go to the admin section and set your Picasa Web Album Username in the Options section.
It would be really useful if you could have a look at this for me. I suspect I have an error somewhere, but as it seems to almost work, it makes me think that the installation is correct. Is it possible to add my gallery information directly in one of the configuration files?
June 24th, 2008 at 3:11 am
By the way, I have only a single plugin (Akismet) activated, and no widgets.
June 24th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Hello Guillaume,
I have prepared your nice plugin to localization as well as made PO and MO files on my language. Also a little adapted kpg.class.php and kpicasa_gallery.php. All worked well and I’m sending zipped plugin to your mail address. Thank you!
June 24th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Hello nr. 2,
I noticed a little problem – cannot give other value for Albums per page than nothing. I I’m trying f.e. 2 for 4 albums, I get two blank pages (Page 1, 2), without any albums. Any idea? (The same with or without my localization hack). Thanks for any info…
July 10th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
This works great! My gallery is here: http://www.derekleewo.com/wp/photos/
Do you have any plans to create widgets? E.g, a widget to display random thumbnails or the most recent photos?
July 13th, 2008 at 10:53 am
I echo what Derek said… a widget would be very cool. The gallery itself is perfect, I tried other galleries out with little success. PhotoXhibit or whatever seems to work, but takes way too much work to make pretty. NextGen is great, except it doesn’t really do anything to the originals (resize, reduce size, rotate) which is a problem. I use Picasa at home, so this is the best so far I’ve seen. A widget would make it even better!
July 15th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I’m so pleased with your plugin, thanks so much!
One niggle though, on a gallery with more than one page, if you press the arrow to go through the images in either Lightbox (my preference) or Highslide, it stops at the end of the visible thumbnails. Is there a way I could change it to keep going through the (not currently visible) thumbnails on the second page? I hope I’ve been clear explaining that – not sure if I have!
July 16th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Is it possible that your kpicasa plugin doesn’t work on the new WordPress 2.6 version. In my case when I click on the kpicasa gallery button in the settingstab I get an error after updating WordPress from 2.5 tot 2.6.
The error is:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/harmonieoefening.nl/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/kpicasa-gallery/param.php on line 3
Are you familiar with this error?
July 16th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Hi Jim,
Maybe this has something to do with version 2.5.1. I’m currently installing 2.6.0 on my test box and will see how it goes.
Guillaume
July 16th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Derek and Michael, I will have a look at this. I will have to implement other features first (see scheduling below), because this feature would depend on them.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Steve, you’re perfectly clear. Maybe I’ll be able to trick Lightbox and get it working. I’m taking note of this.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Hans, it is perfectly possible. I’m installing 2.6 as we speak and I’ll run some tests tomorrow.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I understand about the most recent.
How about a random image(s) widget? You could randomly choose an album from the albums RSS and then randomly choose an image from that album’s images RSS. And if you let the user choose the number of random images you would just repeat that to get ‘x’ random images.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
You make it sound easy but it will/would take time. I would have to change the way I’m using the cache because I wouldn’t want to fetch all the albums and all the photos on every page load. Say someone has 50 albums, even if everything is cached, every few hours I should clear the cache in case new pictures have been updated. That means I would have to query Picasa 50 times to get the fresh set of pictures. Not sure it’s really optimal.
Hmm…
After taking a short break to think about it, I found out there are special hooks in WordPress that allow scheduling some stuff. I could schecule a job to fetch the whole gallery in the background every X hours (up to the user). I would never have to query Picasa on actual page views (like it currently happens now and then), everything would already be pre-fetched. Obviously I would add an “Update now” button in the admin.
I’m probably thinking to myself, but I’m definately going to take a look at this.
July 19th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Is there an update for wordpress 2.6 on the way cause the admin section of the picasa gallery plugin stopt working after I upgraded WordPress? I get this error message in the admin-section:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/harmonieoefening.nl/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/kpicasa-gallery/param.php on line 3
July 19th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Ditto on the 2.6 error… Hope to see an update soon. Thanks in advance!
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_option() in /home/midnit/public_html/kristanne/wp-content/plugins/kpicasa-gallery/param.php on line 3
July 20th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Yes an update is coming soon.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:53 am
hi, good to hear that update is coming soon. I have same param.php error. Any idea when? I have been looking at several different picasa plug-ins and yours looks best!
July 21st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
For those who are subscribed to the comments but don’t visit this blog too often, I released a new version that works with WP 2.6.0.
December 11th, 2008 at 1:13 am
I started out to design a similar plugin about 6 months ago and stumbled upon kpicasa. It has saved me countless hours of development, and is lightweight and simple.
One feature I would personally like to see is a link on the photos page to view the album slideshow on google’s site.
Keep up the great work.