Version 1.33 of Slickr Flickr, released 25th August 2011, has a few new features in both the standard and Slickr Flickr Pro editions. In the standard edition the focus was mainly on the periphery of the slideshow, gallery or galleria: controlling the amount of white space, and in the Slickr Flickr Pro edition the big new feature is ‘private photos’.

New Features

Setting The Bottom Margin

In earlier versions of Slickr Flickr there was a hard-coded bottom margin of 20 pixels plus an additional 40 pixels amount of vertical space allocated for the caption; not to mention a further 50 pixels of space allocated if descriptions=”on” as the description can be multi-line.

In this version the 20 pixels standard bottom margin has been removed. If captions=”on” then the 40 pixels for the single line caption has been reduced to 30 pixels and if captions=”off” then no additional margin is added.

So for non-captioned photos this reduces the whitespace at the foot of the slideshow by 60 pixels.

Moreover, you can now specify exactly how much whitespace you want by using the “bottom” parameter — my parameter naming has sunk to a new low

If you specify bottom=”20″ you have a 20 pixel margin which adds whitespace.

However, if you have non standard (letterbox) image sizes you might want to reduce the white space instead. In this case you can introduce a bottom margin of say bottom=”-30″ to trim some unused whitespace off the bottom of the area allocated for the Flickr photo.

In a nutshell, the excess whitespace has been stripped out, and if you need to make adjustments then use the ‘bottom’ parameter to make your slideshow sit comfortably on the page.

Private Photos (Pro Edition Only)

In the early summer Flickr moved from their own custom authentication to Open Authentication, as used by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al. Slickr Flickr Pro users can now enter their Consumer Secret, Authentication Token and Authentication Secret in the Slickr Flickr Admin Panel and then have the ability to make authenticated calls to Flickr and fetch private photos.

To use the feature just add: private=”on” to the slickr-flickr command.

Click to see an example of fetching private Flickr photos

Enhancements

This release has a few minor improvements:

• Double and single quotes are no longer stripped when displaying captions containing Flickr titles and descriptions
• You can specify default ‘options’ for your galleria 1.2.3 settings on the Slickr Flickr Admin panel so you do not have to specify them on every galleria
• Start and Stop links are hidden for Galleria 1.0 if you set pause=”off”
• The Slickr Flickr Admin Panel has been updated with ‘metaboxes’ so you can close and hide the various panels: the idea here is that less is more. (more or less)

Bug Fixes

This release fixes the following bugs:

• Slickr Flickr no longer adds 40 pixels of whitespace beneath a slideshow when captions=”off”
• For Pro users the Slideshow LightBox display (slightbox) now uses the correct height parameter and hence the amount of white space beneath the image is no longer excessive. Please also note the amount of white space beneath the slideshow can now be tweaked using the ‘bottom’ parameter .

Version 1.30 of Slickr Flickr, released 18th July, has a few new features in both the standard and Pro editions plus a few bug fixes. In the standard edition the work was focussed on supporting the new galleria themes and in the Pro edition the big new feature is ‘random photos’.

New Features

All Galleria Themes/Skins Now Supported

In the previous versions of Slickr Flickr I was using the dimensions of CSS elements as defined in the slickr-flickr.css file to control the size of the galleria. This caused a problem for some galleria themes which wanted to make the galleria larger than the slickr-flickr-galleria container. This restriction has now been removed and Slickr Flickr works well with classic, widescreen, folio, twelve and miniml themes.

Galleria Themes Loaded Dynamically

In the new release, there is no slickr-flickr CSS at all that affects the galleria: what slickr-flickr does is calculate the ‘height’ and ‘width’ parameters for the ‘classic’ theme if the user does not specify them. Slickr Flickr does not need to create a default height for the other themes as these calculate the required galleria dimensions themselves.

As part of the change, I decided to load the galleria theme dynamically rather than the static method of including a javascript file and a CSS file. The advantage of this approach is that there is less dependency on the specific naming and location of the galleria theme files.

I had hoped that with this dynamic loading that I could have multiple gallerias on the same page with different themes – e.g. maybe ‘folio’ in the main content section and a small ‘classic’ galleria in a sidebar or footer widget. However, this did not work out as the loadTheme was applied to all gallerias on the page. Maybe that is something the Galleria developer might address in a future release?

Large Photo Gallerias

Also the old galleria only worked for ‘small’ (240×180), ‘medium’(500×375) and ‘medium 640′ (640×480) standard Flickr photo size but not for ‘large’ (1024×768) photos. On a user request I have now added support for large photos, in both the old Galleria 1.0 and for the classic theme in Galleria versions 1.2 and 1.2.3.

Random Photos (for Pro Users)

The ability to display a small number of random photos from a larger collection has been requested by a few users.

It required a bit more development than just making a random selection as it needed to implement a caching strategy in order to perform well and remain within Flickr’s terms of service. It does not make sense to fetch the information about 200 photos and then only display a random 20 on the page every time the page is refreshed. What the plugin does is cache information about the 200 photos. Then each time the page is refreshed it randomly chooses 20 from the cache and displays those.

I see this feature being most commonly used in a text widget in the sidebar on in a footer which appears on every page. This adds variety to the site as different photos will be displayed on every page visit.

Here is an example of 6 photos of my dog Roma taken problem a selection of 60.

slickr-flickr type="gallery" tag="roma" items="60" random="6"

Refresh this page to see different 6 photos of Roma.

ShutterBox LightBox

If you using the ShutterBox Reloaded plugin you must now use the the ‘Shutterset’ option (the first option) when configuring ShutterBox. This option allows you to have multiple galleries on the page.

Slickr Flickr sets the ‘rel’ element of the photo link with a random group id which groups all the photos in the same collection together into the same ‘shutterset’. If this option is not chosen then all the photos on the page are available in the same lightbox slideshow.

Bug Fixes

This release also fixed a few bugs:

• large Galleria photos are now displayed without scrollbars
• descriptions for the lightbox are no longer passed when not required
• an empty slideshow link parameter no longer results in an link to the page
• autoplay=”off” slideshow option is now working

Not Implemented Yet

I had intended to release support for ‘private photos’ however ran into problems with the new Flickr Open Authentication mechanism which is required to make an authenticated connection to Flickr. I decided I could not hold up this release any longer so it will either be in an interim release later this month or in August.

Version 1.28 of Slickr Flickr was released today with a few new features and some improvements and a choice of payment options for Slickr Flickr Pro. The bulk of the work was related to improving the integration with the latest version of the Galleria jQuery script. Galleria now has a carousel, a choice of themes and around 20 parameters that allow you to configure pretty much every aspect of the appearance and behaviour of the galleria. Slickr Flickr lets you set the galleria parameters via the “options” parameter.

There will be a further release of Slickr Flickr in a week that adds support for private Flickr connections, and multiple Flickr galleries, for Pro Users. I want to create some videos explaining the setup of these features before making them available.

New Features

• Added option search=”galleries” gallery=”your gallery id” to display a Flickr gallery – this now automatically converts from the public gallery id to the compound gallery id so you no longer have to lookup the full compound gallery id
• Added option restrict=”orientation” to filter photos so only those of the desired orientation are displayed

Improvements

• Updated Galleria script to version 1.2.3
• Updated admin feature to choose the version of the Galleria to use including an option not to load Galleria at all if you don’t use this form of display
• Added admin option to select the Galleria theme
• Added admin option to allow Slickr Flickr Javascript to be in either the header or footer (specifically this fixes a mootools/ JQuery loading issue with the Featured Content Gallery Plugin but may also address other plugin conflicts )

New Payments Options

Some users of Slickr Flickr expressed the view that they would like to upgrade to Pro but did not like monthly payments. I have therefore introduced both an annual payment option and a single lifetime payment option.

See Slickr Flickr Pro Upgrade for more on why and how to upgrade.

Current best practice for WordPress plugin developers is to load javascript in the footer as this allows the page content to appear sooner for the visitor. I implemented this feature in Slickr Flickr 1.25 however a few users had problems so I have introduced a more flexible solution where you can now choose whether or not you want javascript loaded in the header or the footer.

Badly Configured Themes Have Problems Due To Missing Hooks

The users who had problems were where their WordPress theme had not implemented the ‘standard’ WordPress hook wp_footer. And because this hook was not called by the theme the javascript that was queued to be loaded in the footer never got loaded at all! Without the javascript being loaded the slideshow, galleries and galleries do not run.

Slickr Flickr Can Load Javascript In Either the Header or the Footer – You Choose

With Slickr Flickr 1.28 the javascripts will by default (once again) be loaded in the header, however you will be able to go into Slickr Flickr Admin Settings, and set the option ‘Load Scripts in Footer’. If this works for your theme then you should be fine to stick with this option.

Avoid Plugin Conflicts By Loading JavaScripts In The Header

Be aware of a potential plugin conflict when trying to load the javascripts in the footer that affects the Featured Content Gallery. Featured Content Gallery incorporates the mootools library which like jQuery uses the ‘$’ symbol. Even using jQuery.noConflict(), the two libraries conflict and give a Javascript error. So it you are using the excellent Featured Content Gallery plugin then you will need to use the default setting of loading Slickr Flickr javascript in the header.

Instructions

If you are not running Featured Content Gallery plugin go to Slickr Flickr Admin settings and set the ‘Load Scripts in Footer’ checkbox.

If your site still works well then stick with this configuration

If you site stops working, remove the tick in the checkbox and revert to loading javascript in the header.

Slideshows and galleries can look a little inelegant if you mix photos of different orientations: i.e. they contain a mix of portrait (3×4) and landscape (4×3) photos.

The new restrict parameter aims to get around this problem by filtering out photos that do not match the restriction.

In the current release; only a single restriction is supported: restrict=”orientation”.

Here are some examples of this feature in action:

Landscape Gallery

If you specify restrict=”orientation” orientation=”landscape” Slickr Flickr will filter out any portrait photos and only display landscape photos.

slickr-flickr search="galleries" gallery="72157625063376003" type="slideshow" orientation="landscape" restrict="orientation"

This has 5 landscape photos.

Day 60 of 227 - Poppy

Susie in the snow

Your army is ready

Pretty Boy

welcome home

Tyler just woke up

Elvis - The Happy Cavalier

Portrait Gallery

Similarly if you specify restrict=”orientation” orientation=”portrait” Slickr Flickr will filter out any landscape photos and only display portrait photos.

slickr-flickr search="galleries" gallery="72157625063376003" type="slideshow" orientation="portrait" restrict="orientation"

This has 2 portrait photos.

Logan

Lizzie

Twelve next weekend!

Full Gallery With No Restriction

If no restriction is applied that you get the mix of portrait and landscape photos

slickr-flickr  search="galleries" gallery="72157625063376003" type="slideshow" 

This has 7 photos.

Day 60 of 227 - Poppy

Susie in the snow

Logan

Your army is ready

Pretty Boy

welcome home

Tyler just woke up

Lizzie

Elvis - The Happy Cavalier

Twelve next weekend!

In later release I plan to add to the restrictions.

For example restriction=”min-height=350″ could filter out any (letterbox) photos that were too short to display in a slideshow where the rest of the photos are of standard landscape size size (500px by 375 px).