kag's tech blog

I’m currently coding what will become 0.2.0. Like I said in an earlier post, for most of you it doesn’t change much. But this new platform will help me in the future for new features.

The main thing that bugged me about kPicasa was that I’m not sure exactly how many people enabled caching on their blog. If the built-in cache wasn’t enabled, or if they used an unknown caching system, kPicasa had to fetch data from Picasa on every single page load. In other words, it was not always optimal.

Now kPicasa will connect to Picasa once a day (or a few other periods) to get the list of all the albums and will store the data in its own cache.

Every current feature of kPicasa Gallery has been ported to this new platform. The only thing left to do is the new error handling. The main problem people are having is that their host doesn’t always allow outside connetions (to Picasa). When that happens, there’s no way kPicasa can work. I’m trying to think of something quick and simple to know right from the start if kPicasa will be able to work.

I commited a new version of kPicasa that is supposed to work in WordPress 2.6.0. Let me know if you’re still having issues. There are no new features in this release.

Get it on the WordPress page

In the meantime, I’m still working on version 0.2.0, which will be a complete overhaul of the way it currently works. I’m planning to take advantage of WP-Cron which will periodically fetch everything in your Picasa account. In simple words, it be a lot easier for me to add new features in the future. Not much will change for the end user for now, but it’s a more solid base for the future.

I’m also going to gradually lock commenting on old posts, in order to only keep the current post alive.