Archives For May, 2008

Description: Finn Rudolphs picture gallery for NextGEN Gallery. Digital animation for thumbing through a physical image stack.

Latest Version: 1.0 - Changelog - TO-DO

Author: Boris Glumpler

Requires at least: WP 2.1.0

Tested up to: WP 2.6

Download: Click here for the zip!

Check out NextGEN FlashViewer, another add-on for your NextGEN Gallery!

NOTE: I would like to add more effects to this plugin, but I am near to useless with JS. So if there are any knowledgeable JS-coders out there, who could modify imageflow.js for use with Thickbox or Lightview then go for it and I will include it!

ONE MORE NOTE: If you have translated NextGEN ImageFlow into your language, then please send me the .po and .mo files and I will include them in the next release. Thank you!

Installation

1. Upload all files except reflect.php to wp-content/plugins/nextgen-imageflow
2. IMPORTANT: Upload reflect.php to your Wordpress root folder
3. Activate the plugin
4. Go to Gallery->ImageFlow and change the options to your liking
5. Go to your post and enter tag [imageflow=GALLERY-ID]

Update

1. Upload new files to the nextgen-imageflow folder using FTP
2. Check to see if everything works…
3. Done!!

Usage

This one is fairly simple. There’s only one tag to use, so all you need to do is find the correct gallery ID, so it’s basically failsafe.

[imageflow=14]

Frequently Asked Questions

1. I installed everything, but I don’t see any images. What am I doing wrong?

   Check if you have uploaded reflect.php to your Wordpress root folder (the directory where your wp-config.php file is in).

2. I set the thumbnails to be displayed by Highslide, but it doesn’t $%*&$§ work?

   Highslide needs to be installed already. All the plugin does is include the necessary compatible files for use with Highslide.

3. My images don’t seem to get cached?

   For the caching to work you have to use the NGG default paths, as NextGEN ImageFlow uses the same cache folder as NGG. So that would be wp-content/gallery/cache.

4. But I changed that path. What can I do?

   Open reflect.php, go down to line 82 and adjust the path. Alternativley you can disable caching by setting $_GET['cache'] in reflect.php on line 33 to 0.

5. ImageFlow works perfectly on my posts, but not on my index page. Why is that?

   According to the ImageFlow homepage you can only use ImageFlow once per page. An object-oriented version of ImageFlow may come in the future though. It is probably best to use ImageFlow below <!–more–> to avoid any problems. Also limit ImageFlow to one occurance per post.

6. Anything else I should know?

   Well, now you can use a reflection with any image on your blog that is not part of your NextGEN Gallery. Instead of referencing the URL of your image you can now write something like this:
   src=”path/2/WP-root/reflect.php?img=rel/path/2/image.jpg”.

The Future

Over time there will be more options available in the admin section and I am planning to add more effects to open images in as well as open the whole gallery in. Leave a comment if you have any feature wishes or if you’ve got something nice to say.

Bugs and other insects

If you encounter any problems, bugs or annoying mosquitos, please leave a comment and I will come running with my can of 100% deet…

Credits and Thanks

The idea for this plugin came from Martin Meier. He helped quite a bit with the testing as well, so thanks, Martin.

It seems that something bad and shocking is always going on in some place of the world. Be it terrorist attacks, diseases or natural disasters, like cyclone Nargis in Myanmar or the recent earthquake in China. Most of the time this results in western countries issuing travel and security warnings either for the whole country or just for affected areas. This obviously is a good thing or rather it could be a good thing. After all travellers and holiday makers need some kind of safety indicator and their own government should be the natural choice for that. The problem here is that the general population with little travel experience takes those travel warnings at face value and doesn’t usually bother reading them themselves. All they hear in the news is that there has been a catastrophe somewhere and that travel warnings have been issued.

By that point the damage is usually done. Holidays get canceled, travel plans get changed and while everybody feels sorry for the victims everybody is glad not to be caught in the aftermath of it all, even though their specific holiday destination might be completely safe. Obviously you can’t blame people for doing that. It’s a natural reaction, but does it really have to be that way? And then there is the moral question of it all. Should you be enjoying your holiday when there are people suffering and dying just a couple hours flight away? This is a very difficult question and one everybody has to answer for themselves.

On Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck Aceh Province, I had been living on Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, for about 10 months, teaching diving. Visitor numbers started to drop within a few days of the disaster and kept on dropping over the next weeks, even though our little island was more than 2500 km away from Banda Aceh. In an industry, where your income depends mostly on commission, this is tantamount to suddenly losing your job. Still, I and other dive instructors were in a relatively good position compared to some of the local people. We had savings, had earned a lot more and didn’t need to support a whole extended family.

When disaster strikes it never only affects the people in the disaster areas, but large parts of the overall population, at least in countries that are dependent on tourism and visitor numbers. The financial consequences of the Boxing Day Tsunami were felt all over Indonesia. It was a disaster after the disaster. Millions of dollars were donated, but I dare say that not much of that money made it to the indonesian people not directly affected by the tsunami. Travellers and tourists further worsened their situation by switching to alternative travel destinations.

Only a little bit of research could show that your initial travel destination is completely safe and if it isn’t then there is always the option of travelling to a different spot in the same country. It will help the local population there immensely. Of course that still leaves the matter of morality, but if you had asked an Indonesian after the tsunami what he preferred, then I’m sure the answer would have been that he’d rather earned enough to put food on the table…

It’s time to leave the safety of your feed reader behind and come have a look at the new Travel-Junkie.com. I vaguely remember saying it’ll be a month before I get it ready, but I just couldn’t help it. Have a look around! It’s been tested in the latest stable releases of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Saying that there are probably still a few quirks around. If you find one then drop me a note.

The picture above was taken on a quick unplanned trip to Wanaka, about an hours drive north of Queenstown. Gorgeous little place with lots of little bars…

I have just received this photo from a friend on Facebook and apparently what you can see are chinese soldiers holding what looks like tibetan monk robes. It doesn’t take much to imagine what they were planning to do with those robes, does it?

There’s some exciting news. At least I think so. Nobody else probably does, but whatever… I have started work on the Travel-Junkie Theme V 3.0. There’s gonna be lots of jqueryness, ajax magic, lots of gloss and overall it’ll be just fab, while still retaining most of the look and feel of version 2.5 (that’s what we’re on right now in case you didn’t know). It’ll be a long and rocky road, so you can expect the new look in about 1 months or so.

In other news… It seems that time is running out for me in New Zealand. It has started snowing occasionally, which I find quite depressing at times, so I’m thinking of packing my stuff to head for warmer climates, beaches and palm trees. If I do, then I will definitely be back next summer to do some travelling instead of just working. What do you think?