alex.rabe

Time for a new version and your feedback. This version include two new features :

WordPress 3.0 Multisite support
I never used WPMU but I did my best to get it running again under Multisite environment. As you know it run into a upgrade loop, this version should fix this problem and more over you can upgrade all blogs via one click
jQuery Cycle Slideshow integration
It’s maybe not the best looking solution, as I wrote in my previous post their exists tons of good solutions, but it comes nearest to the flash slideshow layout. Just browse your gallery on your iPhone or iPad and give me your feedback.

Please report any bug in the forums. Thanks !

Update : New Beta 3 should fix issues with IE browser and Slideshow. If you upgrade a multisite blog to this version, please deactivate / re-activate the plugin “site wide”.

Download NextGEN Gallery Version 1.6.0 Beta 3
Beta version @ Google code

I’m working now a couple of weeks on a new slideshow options, which is based on pure Javascript, so it’s possible to view them as well on a iPad/iPhone and other mobile devices. I estimated that it will take just a couple of hours, but I ran into various challenges. I would like to share some of my problems :

First of all I looked for all the great jQuery Plugins on the market, here you find IMHO the best ones. I thought that I just need to grab one of these slideshow plugins and add this to my code, but I came across a couple of problems to replace the existing flash solution. A flash slideshow solves three issues :

Any theme related style sheet didn’t affected the flash layout
It load images step by step
It can resize mixed image formats ( portrait / landscape )

NextGEN Gallery is a plugin which should nearly handle all kind of themes / layout / formats, if you look into the samples above you find a lot of great designed slideshow, but they will not fit to every theme layout. So I need to pickup a solution which requires a minimum of styling, the rest should be pat of the theme author.

Another point : The most jQuery Slideshow plugins are not designed for loading speed, they parse a hidden div/ul list which contain the images. This is ok for 5-10 images, but not for a gallery which can contain 100+ images. A page load will blow up. So I need to add a AJAX based loading for the images. I study a couple of plugins and decided to use jQuery Cycle, it contains a lot of functions and can handle a AJAX loading of images.

In the second step I’m looking for a reliable solution to resize a image to the wanted size and keep the ratio, also jQuery Cycle has here some problems. WordPress.com introduce a slideshow feature and while I study the solution I recognize that they resize the images on server side, no need to handle this later in the script code. Very good for bandwidth, but I need to cache resized images in this case , otherwise your web hoster and your server cpu usage will blow up.

Currently I load the full images step by step and setup then the wanted container height, I’m still working on a solution to center images. You can watch a first result here :

http://nextgen-gallery.com/playground/jquery-cycle/

Any hints / comments for a better solution are welcome