kag's tech blog

This new version fixes one very minor bug, one minor CSS annoyance and is a little bit more flexible with those with very custom installations:

• Was not using the PHP function defined() correctly. But this is more of a cosmetic bug fix, as this wasn’t causing any trouble;
• Removed « !important » from one of the CSS rules, as requested by Ted Thompson;
• For those using WordPress 2.6 and higher, it now tries to use the WP_PLUGIN_URL constant, instead of hard-coding the plugins directory path. This allows people who moved the plugins directory somewhere else to use kPicasa Gallery. No impact on people who are already using kPicasa Gallery. Requested by Martin.

Hello everyone,

I just released a new version of kPicasa Gallery. This new version brings a much requested feature, video support.

For this first release, selecting the Highslide engine will integrate the video on your site. Other engines will open a new window to the video on your Picasa account. This is because only Highslide provides an easy way to play videos in a popup.

For an example, check out the « Expérimentations » album in the demo. The last thumbnail on the page is a video.

Don’t forget to rate kPicasa Gallery on its WordPress page!

Yet another day, yet another release.

Thanks to Jóhann Agnarsson who pointed out a bug in yesterday’s release.

This one fixes a bug where selecting anything else than 144px as the thumbnail size had the effect of showing the same image in the JavaScript popup (instead of the largest image).

I also fixed an incompatibility with the latest Highslide that I didn’t notice before.

And last but not least, I added the option of using Slimbox 2 or Thickbox as the JavaScript engine.

Thank you for understanding that I don’t have anyone to test my code before I release. I’m doing my best!

Hi everyone,

Another day, another release. This time I simply refreshed Highslide and Lightbox to their latest release.

I was about to include Slimbox but I don’t see the advantage. Lightbox uses the scriptaculous JavaScript framework, and it’s already included by default by WordPress. Okay it’s 18Kb compared to Slimbox’s 4Kb. But you have to include the whole MooTools frameworks for Slimbox 1 or jQuery for Slimbox 2, which are 63Kb and 19Kb respectively.

EDIT: I wasn’t aware that jQuery was bundled with WordPress! I’ll add Slimbox 2 as soon as I have a few minutes. I also found out that WordPress comes with Thickbox, why not add it as an option as well!

Sorry everyone, I left a nasty bug in yesterday’s release. If you upgraded kPicasa but did not go in the Settings page to set your thumbnail sizes, the album thumbnail would not show. It is now fixed.

This is only an announcement, please discuss in the 0.1.6 post.

I took advantage of the bad weather outside to update kPicasa Gallery. Before proceeding any further, I would like to thank David Trattnig for his code for the thumbnail size selector and Bill Ritz for his tips on showing private albums.

Here are the new features:

• You can now show private albums (for advanced users)
• You can now select the thumbnail size for the album cover, and its pictures
• Text can now be typed before and after the kPicasa output. The kPicasa call just needs to be on its own line.

Here are the instructions to display a private album:

1. Log into your Picasa Web Albums account
2. Find the URL of the private album you want to show. For example:
   http://picasaweb.google.com/YourPicasaUsername/TripToEurope?authkey=Gv1sRgCILA9ebdxLyZaQ
3. In that URL, locate the album name
4. In that same URL, locate the authkey. Please note that the authkey is 20 characters long and does NOT include the # character that might be at the end of the URL.
5. Call kPicasa with the following syntax: KPICASA_GALLERY(TripToEurope#Gv1sRgCILA9ebdxLyZaQ)

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.

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.

For those who are interested in kPicasa but are still running PHP4, you can check out kPicasa Gallery PHP4MOD. It’s a PHP4 port of the regular kPicasa, made by David Trattnig.

Great work David!