Simpleviewer module

Hi, my first post here.

Is there a module for a better slideshow like Simpleviewer or Flashnifties?

I was actually surprised these slideshows are not yet a module of G2.

Thanks.

I'm writing a simpleviewer plugin. First version should be ready in a couple of days.

OK folks, here it is, my first ever contribution to an GPL'd project.

What it is: a basic interface to allow Simpleviewer (http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/) to load its pictures from a Gallery2 installation. Simpleviewersource is a small module that produces the xml output that simpleviewer uses.

What it isn't: a full gallery theme based around Simpleviewer, although it might be useful if someone wanted to create one.

What is also is: a bit rough. I may not have ironed out all the bugs, and there may be some coding nastyness - consider this an alpha version. My helmet strap is tightened and I am ready to face the brickbats.

Installation and setup is obvious: use the admin page to set the <simpleviewer></simpleviewer> parameters, then in your webpage where you want simpleviewer to load, use this line in the javascript loader, substituting for your own Gallery installation and the item_Id of the album with the pictures:

fo.addVariable("xmlDataPath", http://www.yourGallery.com/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.XMLOut%26g2_itemId=xxxxx");

You can override the global simpleviewer parameters in the Admin page on an hierarchical sub-album overrides album basis, using the CustomFields module. Create an album field called "simpleviewersource" and in it place the parameters that should be used: thus for example:
navPosition='bottom' frameColor='0x0000ff'

An additional configuration option (not currently overrideable) is a limit to the number of items to show. Simpleviewer isn't designed for large albums and can trash the performance of your pc by loading hundreds of photos. So the Admin page for this module includes a way to limit the number of photos shown to the first 'n' in any album.

---

Notes:

• You need to know the albumId: you can read this from the url of the album if you turn off URL Rewrite.
• The code of Simpleviewer demands the same 'filename' for the image as for its thumbnail. It is, however, quite happy to create thumbnails of the right size on the fly. Since the download path for a thumbnail from Gallery isn't simply related to the main image URL it would be tricky to use Gallery's thumbnails as simpleviewer's too. So I haven't. [fixed from 0.1.1]
• g2_view=core.DownloadItem which is used as the imagepath does not appear to honour the watermark status of images. (Why, anyone?) So watermarks don't seem to show up even when they're set. However given the point above about thumbnails, it means that the thumbnails stay watermark free.[done]
• The per album override method is really hacky: simpleviewer (apparently) uses the first declaration of any parameter; all this module does is stack up all the custom fields in ascending hierarchy without parsing and removing duplicates. That'll be something to fix.[done]

---

Ideas for the future:

• Allow a configuration of which size image to supply to simpleviewer, where a choice exists in an album. Or generate a given size on the fly.
• Allow per album options via a dedicated simpleviewersource tab on the 'Edit Album' page [done]
• Allow selection of albums by other methods not requiring the itemId
• Build a theme around simpleviewer, using this module as the core to display the images
• Translations

---

Please try this out, and let me know how it goes. All corrections, bugs, suggestions etc gratefully received. Acknowlegements to turnbulm, jayhen and others for the inspiration and for chunks of code lifted and modified from their Checkout modules.

[edit] for the latest version see this page:
http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Modules:simpleviewersource

I have created a codex page ( only boilerplate info at this time ):
http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Modules:simpleviewer
please update it as required.
Thanks for the contribution.

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

Version 0.2.2 now ready...

Improvements:

• Module no longer needs a siteAdmin page but has a page under Edit Album, where all options are set hierarchically. So set them in the root album, and override in sub and sub sub albums.
• You can enter the name of custom parameters (for those people who've customised Simpleviewer, like me) on each page too.
• Custom parameters entered in any album are offered to you as options for every other album; you don't need to type the parameter name in again.
• You can disable Simpleviewer for any album or part of the album tree.
• the config page displays the correct url to put into simpleviewer for the album in question so you can copy-and-paste.

There seem to be two options for getting the image; either source it directly, replicating some of the code from the core.DownloadImage view, or issue a 307 redirect and have the browser (on behalf of simplevier) re-request each image and thumbnail. Both work, both have pros and cons, and interact with the browser cache differently. Currently the code redirects; to use the other method comment out these two lines in the DownloadMax.inc and DownloadThumbnail.inc files:

	header("Location:$mainUrl", TRUE, 307);
	exit();

There may be some more bugs lurking, please let me know if you use this module.

Fixed the Undefined variable warnings, thanks. Not sure about the Undefined index though

fixed, thanks

I've rewritten the way urls are generated but I don't have an embedded gallery to test it on, so please feel free...

"Gallery Not Found" (I think) means that Simpleviewer isn't receiving the XML. (If it gets the XML but fails to load any images you get X's instead of pictures). Can you post exactly what you put in your index.html? (Did you escape the & in the url fed to Simpleviewer to %26?)

Check also (in case of more issues) that
http://localhost/fred/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.DownloadThumb&g2_itemId=25 downloads a thumbnail
and
http://localhost/fred/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.DownloadMax&g2_itemId=25 downloads the same image.

(both those URL's should generate a 307 redirect to take you to the right url.)

*new XMLOut.inc attached*

Just a thought...

If the path to the swf file is such that Flash thinks the xml file is coming cross-domain it requests a crossdomain.xml file (see http://www.crossdomainxml.org/) for permission to load it: try adding this file to your localhost's root www directory:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
   <allow-access-from domain="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>

And call it crossdomain.xml

If that doesn't help, any chance you could use something like the Firefox Live Http Headers plugin to see what url Simpleviewer is actually requesting?

Changing the & to %26 worked. It's now loading the thumbnails. There was no need for the crossdomain stuff, since it's all on localhost.

Now the problem is that the fullsized images are not showing up. I'm only getting the three thumbnails on the left of the page and no large images at all, either on initial page load or when clicking on the thumbnails.

Kirk
____________________________________
G2Image Documentation, G2Image Demo Page, My Family Website

Alec,

I'm only expecting the three thumbnails I'm getting. It's a small test album. The thumbnails are actually showing up as images, not X's.

I installed the Firefox Live Http Headers plugin and looked. (Great plugin, by the way.) The call and reply are going out for the correct fullsized images. Example:

http://localhost/fred/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.DownloadMax&g2_itemId=28

(/fred/ is my dev box Gallery2 directory. I renamed it to make sure that WPG2 was not dying if it was not /gallery/ or /gallery2/ for its autovalidation scripts while troubleshooting WordPress/Gallery2 URL rewrite coordination.)

If I copy that to my address bar, it brings up the correct image. So, it looks like it's getting there, just not displaying.

I'm thinking maybe some of my SimpleViewer settings may not be right. I've attached a screenshot of what I put in. Again, this is where a default set of known working settings would be great.

EDIT: I unset all of the settings, except enabled, and it's working now in /simpleviewer/index.html. I also now have it working in a WordPress post. It's very cramped, so I'll have to play with the CSS some. How did you get the moving slideshow effect on the sample page you sent me?

Kirk
____________________________________
G2Image Documentation, G2Image Demo Page, My Family Website

For the parameters that have fixed choices, like navPosition, it would be good to have a pulldown selector that limits selection to the valid choices. It would also be good to have error checking in the options to check for 0xffffff instead of ffffff.

No problem on the moving slideshow. There are other free scripts to do that with.

One thing I noticed (see attached screenshot) is that the fullsized images are the originals instead of the preferred derivatives, which include watermarks. The large image should have the same "Steffensenfamily.com" watermark in the lower right-hand corner. I had the same problem in G2Image. See this thread for the code I used to fix it. Your mileage may vary. I haven't looked at your code to see how well it matches.

(I don't actually use watermarks on my family website, but it's a good idea to include them on your dev box, because a lot of people do.)

Kirk
____________________________________
G2Image Documentation, G2Image Demo Page, My Family Website

Ok, here's the latest collection of changes:

• The copy-and-paste-me url in the simpleviewersource tab has the & escaped to %26 for easier setup
• Configuration after installation inserts a minimal working set of options into the root directory
• couple of other random fixes, as detailed above

I still have problems with the new version (I've added the changes capt_kirk mentioned above), as the XML file created is not well formed:

http://sandbox.p0ggel.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.XMLOut&g2_itemId=65094

For some reason the g2_itemId is empty in the thumbpath.

---

h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org

That threw me at first, too. But both thumbpath and imagepath are the leading part of the path that is appended to the id supplied for each image. If you're using Firefox to look at your XML page, look at the page source. There is more behind it that doesn't display on firefox for some reason. Here's what I got for your page:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><simpleviewerGallery maxImageHeight='640' maxImageWidth='640' textColor='#ffffff' frameColor='#ffffff' frameWidth='640' stagePadding='5' navPosition='left' thumbnailColumns='3' thumbnailRows='3' title='moblog' thumbPath='http://sandbox.p0ggel.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.DownloadThumb&g2_itemId=' imagePath='http://sandbox.p0ggel.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.DownloadMax&g2_itemId=' >
<image><filename>65097</filename><caption>office.jpg</caption></image>
<image><filename>65101</filename><caption>xmaseve-cover.jpg</caption></image>
<image><filename>65103</filename><caption>Picture007.jpg</caption></image>
</simpleviewerGallery>

The filename attribute is appended to both the thumbpath and the imagepath for getting the thumbnails and the images. So, it looks like the item id is empty, but it's really just a prefix.

Kirk
____________________________________
G2Image Documentation, G2Image Demo Page, My Family Website

Since When
____________________________________
Wordpress / Gallery2 (WPG2) Plugin, , WPG2 Documentation, WPG2 Demo

OK,I think I've got it... you're not using the URL rewrite module for download URLs, and simpleviewersource.DownloadMax and simpleviewersource.DownloadThmb were escaping the & in the URL they were redirecting your browser to for each image, to &amp; which failed when passed back to core.DownloadItem by the browser.

I've changed the parameters to generateURL - hope this should work now. Please test and let me know.

Excellent, the last updates fixed that issue. I still can't get anything but thumbnails working though?

---

h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org

I set the maxImageHeight and maxImageWidth to 640, not the frameWidth which I didn't set at all. I didn't set textColor or frameColor either.
Unsetting the options did nothing, I still don't get anything besides thumbs.

---

h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org

Ah, I've changed which album i want it from since then But, I found the error. While playing with this I also set some parameters for the root album, that was the values overriding the non-set parameters for the sub albums. After cleaning that up, it works fine!

My bad. ;-)

---

h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org

I'm getting a security violation when I try to view the xml output:

http://christianjamesphoto.com/main.php?g2_view=simpleviewersource.XMLOut%26g2_itemId=31281

and simpleviewer doesn't show anything besides the title of the album:

http://christianjamesphoto.com/simpleviewer/index.html

are there directory permissions that are set wrong or something?

--
Chris
http://ChristianJamesPhoto.com

This version should display original images with watermarks, if they are set.

ckawlek: see if this new version fixes your problem, too.

Alecmyers: No, I don't think we can move it. You could just make a new thread and put your release notes there. And, we should get some of the devs to look at this and possibly put it on gallery-contrib so people can download it via Downloadable Plugins.

---

h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org

The new version works perfectly! Thanks!
I also went back and set the chmod permissions for the simpleviewer module folder to 777 - that's where it's supposed to be, right?

--
Chris
http://ChristianJamesPhoto.com

Alec,

First, the latest version worked straight out of the box! Thanks.

I've been creating a sandbox for testing, so that it's not all on my laptop where I can't show someone what I'm talking about. Please look at http://sandbox.steffensenfamily.com/g2image/simpleviewer/

I have the max height and width set to 800 in the root gallery, but the sandbox page is downloading the fullsized images instead of the smaller resizes. I haven't looked at the code yet, but did you mean it to download resizes that are smaller than the max sizes? If so, I have some code in G2Image that I can paste for you to modify and include.

Kirk
____________________________________
G2Image Documentation, G2Image Demo Page, My Family Website

Alec,

No worries. I've done that many times (made it work for my Gallery and then find out someone else uses it differently, like the whole watermarks thing...)

Since my camera takes great pics at 8 megapixels, I like to post them, but have multiple resizes. I rarely need the fullsizes, but the Gallery acts like an instant repository for the few times that I really want the full quality. Most of the time though, the resizes are more than enough, especially for web viewing instead of printing.

I'm almost done with the code. I have it getting the resizes, I just need to finish the logic about which specific resize is best. But I'm falling asleep. Will finish and post tomorrow.

Kirk
____________________________________
G2Image Documentation, G2Image Demo Page, My Family Website

Kirk,

You're getting the maxImageHeight & maxImageWidth settings by running another parameter query in DownloadMax on the parent album of the item being downloaded - but those settings might in fact be in a higher level album (as you found out) so you'd need to build the full parent tree and trawl for if/where those settings might be.

Better is to send the maxImageHeight and maxImageWidth as parameters back to DownloadMax by including them in the url which we built in XMLOut. That way the inheritance comes for free.

Try these two files - see if they accomplish the same thing (I think I've tested the corner cases, but I might have missed something).

The logic as to which image to select goes like this:

• Build an array of all permissible derivatives, including the original and the thumbnail
• Sort it by width (implicit assumption that all images have the same aspect ratio, but can't think of an exception that breaks badly)
• Decide whether width-bound (true if maxImageHeight & maxImageWidth are taller and thinner than this image) or not
• If so, send the first resize wider than maxImageWidth (if there is one)
• If not, send the first resize taller than maxImageHeight (if there is one)
• If maxImageHeight and maxImageWidth not set, or otherwise, send the largest (probably the original, but who knows)

If it works for you I'll roll them into a 0.2.5 edition.

Minor edits to previous files...

Change DownloadMax.inc at line 123 from:

$widthbound = ( $potentialImages[0]->height * $maxImageWidth < $potentialImages[0]->width * $maxImageHeight ) ? 1 : 0;

to:

	$widthbound = ( !$maxImageHeight || $potentialImages[0]->height * $maxImageWidth < $potentialImages[0]->width * $maxImageHeight ) ? 1 : 0;

for when $maxImageHeight is zero (i.e. unset)

Also change DownloadMax.inc at line 134 from:

if ( $maxImageHeight ) {

to:

elseif ( $maxImageHeight ) {

To avoid some unnecessary looking-for-sizes-that-don't-exist.

Glad you like the approach ;-)