BuddyPress

If you need a free image gallery or photo album for BuddyPress, BP Album+ is probably the plugin you’re looking for. BP Album+ adds instant, FaceBook style photo albums to all of your user’s profiles.

You can always get the most up-to-date version from the WordPress plugin repository at this link:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-album/

Or, if you like living on the bleeding-edge of BuddyPress development, you can get the latest beta here:

http://foxly.ca/bp-album-1_6_BETA.zip

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This forum thread is for discussing new features the community would like to see in future releases of the BP Album+ plugin.

All ideas are welcome, no matter how crazy, bandwidth-intensive, or strange …but the final call on what goes into the plugin and when will be made by the development team.

Photos and user interfaces are a uniquely “visual” thing, so when posting an idea to this thread, please try to include a LINK to a website that’s doing the thing you want included in the plugin. For original functions that don’t exist *anywhere* yet, draw a sketch of your idea in a paint program and post a link to the image.

This will make it much easier for users that don’t speak English to understand your idea.

So, Let’s get started!

^F^

Deciding how to dimension thumbnails, based on images with widely varying aspect ratios, and then present them in a grid, has been a problem that has dogged graphic designers since the earliest days of the Internet.

The two most popular way to do this are “Facebook Style”

http://foxly.ca/facebook-style.jpg

and “Flickr Style”

http://foxly.ca/flickr-style.jpg

I’m actually writing code for *both* options *right now*, and after some back and forth with @francescolaffi we’ll probably get it set up as an option in the administrator backend.

We could probably add the ability for users to manually crop the thumbnail for each picture in their gallery using the avatar cropping tool, and I will look at the feasibility of doing this. Experience has shown that most users do *not* want to do this for every picture they upload …and that’s why neither Facebook nor Flickr include this functionality.

^F^

I prefer the Flickr Style myself. Any ideas on this?

One thing I noticed. After I upload a photo, then I post a regular update (not a reply). It acts like a reply sorta. But it shouldn’t be displayed under a photo upload. Here are some screenshots

http://i41.tinypic.com/2lmpcg6.png

http://i42.tinypic.com/21nmzcy.png

Then where could I place this code so it will run when a new photo is uploaded or deleted so my members can earn points for uploading pics

‘
if( function_exists(‘cp_alterPoints’) && is_user_logged_in() ){
cp_alterPoints(cp_currentUser(), 20);
cp_log(‘Photo Upload’, cp_currentUser(), 20, Community)

}
‘
So far I love it! Keep up the great work guys!

Facebook style. But really don’t code it so we theme developers can’t re arrange it.

My first request is to allow more than one album for better organization.
Second request is group albums that anyone in group can upload to.
Third request is in activity stream uploads.

Flickr style.

As for requests,
Modemlooper pretty much named everything that this plugin should have.

Flickr style.
Clean & easy on the eye!

^^^ What @modemlooper said. That will make the plugin useful to 1000% more people, also I consider these to be basic functionalities (apart from activity stream uploads which is sexy although not essential).

Facebook style. But really don’t code it so we theme developers can’t re arrange it.

Was going to say exactly the same as modemlooper has.

Theming must be left as much as possible to the fronttend coders, I understand the necessity to have to have some default layout out of the box but it’s crucial that if we develop themes (rather than skins ) they be as sacrosanct as possible. I already have a degree of apprehension in building themes after the transition from the 1.1.* approach to 1.2 where the default theme is moved to the plugin directory for ease of upgrading as this suggests each upgrade will actually cause us issues.

Modemloopers suggestions are just about on the money, group albums, and maybe the ability to aggregate all albums on one page possibly? but not sure if that is that important just reminded that SN such as Ning have a page where all uploaded images may be viewed.

Great Plugin folks! As bandwidth, and storage space can easily become an issue, is there any plan to integrate Amazon S3 (or some other CDN) functionality to it? Thanks. Keep up the great work!

We hear ya!

Template developers will LOVE the next release.

You’ll see…

^F^

So since this is to discuss new features: I would like to see groups to be able to upload picture to a group album.

Attention template developers! Your Feedback is required!

We have finished the template set for the next release of the plugin, and we’d like your feedback so we can modify the plugin to make your life easier.

Download the code here:

http://foxly.ca/bp-album_0-1-6-FOR_TEMPLATE_DEVELOPERS.zip

You have 24 hours to evaluate it and post your feedback.

Thanks!

^F^

@acousins – BP Album is designed to be highly extensible. The plugin uses an abstract data object, so with a minimal amount of coding you can make a “micro plugin” to handle just about anything – including image files, audio, movies, streaming videos, flash files, and data formats yet to be invented.

@Bpisimone – This is on the features list for an upcoming version.

^F^

FEATURES IN THE UPCOMING 0.1.7 RELEASE

Okay community, we’ve just finished our developer’s meeting and have decided what features we’re going to include in the next BP Album+ release. They will be as follows:

1) Multiple album capability based on image tags. We will be mimicking Flickr’s image tagging, sorting, and gallery functions. Users will be able to tag their images, and create albums based on the tags they apply.

There will be two classes of image tags: user tags, and admin tags. User tags can be used for sorting and grouping images, admin tags can be used by administrators to approve images for various purposes, as well as for use by other plugins on the site. For example, on a dating site that charges users to view or upload images, or a realty site that charges realtors to post property photos.

2) The ability to tag site members in photos, with the ability for the photo owner to remove unwanted tags from their photo, and the ability for a user that has been tagged in the photo by the owner to remove themselves as well. The tagging system will tie into the @mention system within BuddyPress. Support will be included for “bounding box” tags on images as is done on Flickr (face tags on FaceBook), but the function will not be activated in this release.

3) Configurable thumbnail aspect ratios. There will be a setting in the admin menu that allows the plugin to be switched between “Facebook Style” AND “Flickr Style” thumbnail display.

4) “Perfect” templates – all of the HTML will be generated IN the template and be fully editable by the template developer. Image rendering functions will accept size parameters. This will allow template developers to dramatically alter the look of the plugin.

… That’s it …

We’re targeting Monday next week for a beta release.

Get excited!

^F^

wow drooling

Testing your theme stuff

EDIT: genius to keep the default BP structure. All plugins should do this. Easy to customize. Including a custom theme in your child theme is the way to go if BP plugins want mass inclusion. This is the only plugin that I’ve seen do this.