[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Tosh

We haven’t seen that error before …I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow (its currently 10pm here).

Please post some example URL’s from the site that consistently give the error. (This one is probably site-specific, so I’ll need to debug it on the actual live website).

Thanks!

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

First off, I visited your site and confirmed that BP Album+ is working correctly.

You’re having problems because you’ve modified wordpress to display one URL in the browser while running the actual site on another …this is VERY BAD, because the modification you’ve made only handles *one* of *many* ways plugins generate URLs and file paths. That’s why we had to modify part of the BP Album+ code for you so it would work on your site.

Modifying BP Album+’s activity stream code to work on your site would be much more difficult. The code gets the base URL from BuddyPress; so we would have to hook the BuddyPress function that does that and modify the URL, and that could break other parts of your installation. It would require testing and debugging, and so on.

Also, version 0.1.9 of BP Album+ (which I’m taking a break from coding to answer your post) has at least *fifty* different functions that would have to be modified so it would work on your site, which is completely impractical to do.

Fortunately, you can fix *all* of these problems quickly and easily, have WordPress in a subdirectory, and have the subdirectory invisible in the URL, by properly setting up your web server.

Here’s how:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/vhosts/

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@jivany

BP Album+ has a very straightforward roadmap: systematically clone the media management features of Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube …and do it as quickly as possible.

In order of priority, we’re working on the following features:

1) Batch file uploading (2 -3 days)

2) AJAX image sorting (about a week)

3) Demo templates (that show all the features, emulate facebook and flickr, etc) (about 10 days)

4) Albums for groups (about 2 weeks)

5) Streaming audio and video (about 3 weeks)

Then…

6) Disk quota

7) Tight integration with BP’s tagging and search functions

Photos widget, “your friends’s recently updated media”, etc

9) “Like” feature on media items. (Possibly dependent on BP, as I think they’re adding capability to the BP core)

10) Inappropriate content flagging

Then…

At that point we basically match Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube feature-for-feature.

I’m sure after that we’ll get lots of site-specific feature requests (can you add a feature that lets users doodle on their photos, etc) but the core features give you what you need to run practically any website.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

RE: Hey Foxly is it possible to use NetBeans to edit files live on the server? Was just curious because I want to test it out, I currently use GVim.

It depends what you mean by “Live on the Server”.

If you mean “Live on a LOCAL development server”, yes, NetBeans excels at this job. It even automatically refreshes modified files, so if you’re dumping debug info to a text file and have it open in NetBeans, added text will show up in the display sort of like a terminal window.

On the other hand, if you mean “Live on a remote server”, yes it can do that as well. Ideally just by mounting the remote server HTTP directory as a network drive.

I think NetBeans might also have FTP functionality, but I haven’t tried it yet.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

RE: I was wondering if there are any plans/timescale to add album/picture ratings to your album+ plugin? Sort of a “thumbs up”, “thumbs down” system.

Eventually, yes.

Basically, we’re systematically adding every feature you’d see on a major social networking site.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@jordashtalon

We do not currently have the plugin linked to the global search function, but we’ll get it added as we continute with development.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gpo1

We will be including our own flash player with the plugin.

That way, BP users won’t have to work with a closed-source player or a very restrictive open source one that forces you to put 3rd party advertising on your content.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gpo1

Re:”Am impressed with the plugin,so far and awaiting below because users are using smartphones like Iphone & android more for internet .”

The plugin *already does* what we just described. The functions, and documentation on what they do, are located in:

bp-album-templatetags.php

sub-album-templatetags.php

sub-media-templatetags.php

sub-meta-templatetags.php

This is a situation where I can’t post a block of code for you that magically does what you want.

You’ll need to select the right functions for your application from the X-templatetags.php files, and write code that uses them to output the correct data for your template.

I really don’t want to sound like one of those “elite” programming types that won’t show others how to do stuff, but honestly, the wordpress codex site does a *much* better job of teaching how to do this stuff than I could ever achieve writing forum posts.

Start here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates

And then here: https://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/building-a-buddypress-child-theme/

And if you need to learn how to use PHP, go here: http://www.php.net

Also, be sure to use a proper code editor, which you can get here: http://www.netbeans.org …if you’ve never used a “smart” editor before, the experience could be life-changing…

Enjoy!

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Mike Pratt

I think another amusing point about the whole “online social community” thing is that people mistakenly think Facebook invented all these concepts and that we’re somehow “ripping off” Facebook by emulating these features.

Facebook did not invent ANY of the key features people associate with social networking.

That credit goes to the dial-up bulletin board community of the late 1980’s. Specifically, a piece of software called “The Major BBS”, which you can learn about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_BBS

Twenty years ago, when I was coding “plug-ins” in C for Major BBS, we had ALL of the following features:

Poking = “Paging” You would type “/p username” and it would pop-up on the other user’s screen if they were online. Or if they were offline the system would queue-up pages and notify you when you logged back in.

User Profiles = “User Registry”

Facebook Apps = “Add Ons”

Chat = “Teleconference”

Private Messaging = “Site Mail”

Friends = (Implemented using a lot of different features, but to the same net effect.)

Activity Stream = “Site News(?)”

Groups = “Forums” (Entirely text based)

Photos = “File Archives”. (Text based, queued downloads. At the time it would have taken 20 minutes to download a 300×600 pixel image, and JPG had not been invented yet. So you would queue the images you wanted to see and let them download overnight)

Marketplace = (Done with “classified ads” add-on)

FaceBook Ads = (Ads were manually added to pages by the SysOp, but could be paid for online with a credit card using another add-on)

And many of the major BBS features in turn emulate old UNIX functionality.

So to all those who are worried about [insert company name] patenting [whatever feature] or who feel bad about “copying” what somebody else is doing, practically any patent claim can be easily invalidated by showing prior art.

Anyways, back to coding…

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Mike Pratt

I think all three of your points are great ideas.

First off, with regards to #1, we’ll be adding full configurability for what privacy categories are called and which ones are available. The code is already in the place for this, we just need to add the config options to the admin screen.

Second, with regards to the album creation process, actually the way Facebook implements it is just with an “Add Media” button on the home screen. And then as part of the upload process, you create an album for the media items. So the process has “flow”.

We’re going to do this as well, but we have to get the multi-file uploader finished first.

Third, with regards to tagging friends. Again, Facebook implements it exactly as you have described …and so will we.

It’s actually been very easy to design the UI for this plugin. Whether they realize it or not, everybody wants every feature to work like either a) Flickr, or b) Facebook or c) YouTube …lol

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

###############################################################################

REMINDER * REMINDER * REMINDER * REMINDER* REMINDER * REMINDER

###############################################################################

Just a reminder to everyone on the thread, that the current beta we are now discussing is

version 0.1.9.2 which you can download here:

https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/bp-album/branches/foxly/0.1.9.1/bp-album-BETA-0-1-9-2.zip

It’s *hugely* different from the 0.1.7 version currently being distributed on the wp plugin site.

###############################################################################

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@xspringe – we’re glad you like the plugin. And remember, you can help make BP Album+ even better by contributing feature suggestions, translations, and code!

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@jordashtalon – dynamically resizing images on the server would consume so much CPU time you’d probably get kicked off a shared host within hours. Even at moderate traffic, it would easily saturate a dedicated server.

We’ve included template tags that let you:

a) determine what cached sizes of an image exist

b) the x and y pixel size of those cached versions

That’s so you can write a PHP routine in your template that selects the closest-sized image and conditionally includes w= and h= markup elements to resize the image within a template to the smallest bounding X or Y dimension.

This lets you resize an image without distorting its aspect ratio, and without using javascript. So it works on every platform, including the iPhone.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gene53 – Facebook and Flickr require users to create an album before uploading, so we’re following that lead.

There are some compelling technical reasons for doing this.

First, if users didn’t have to group their media into albums, many of them wouldn’t. The result of this would effectively be like the user having one massive album with thousands of images. So when we went to the database to get that user’s images, the query would return like 2,500 images instead of 200 (which is the maximum number of images FaceBook lets a user have in one album). That would be a huge database hit, and slow down the site.

Second, to provide a quality user experience. It has been shown that people will eventually get tired of digging through an unorganized photo set and stop browsing pictures. To get a first-hand experience at this, go to a site like “istockphoto.com” and try to find a picture of a female model typing at a computer by typing in ONLY the search term “female”.

Generally, it’s a bad idea to force users to do things. But sometimes a gentle “5 seconds of work” push in the right direction greatly improves the community. That’s why the plugin is set up this way.

Also, if you’re running a “hobby site” where you’ve only got a couple of thousand members, future updates to the admin screen will let you disable albums entirely and dump all the media on a single page, much as version 0.1.7 does.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gene53 – the plugin will downsample the image to fit in that size, and convert it to a JPG.

Generally, downsizing original images is a bad decision. It’s okay to downsize the images that are *displayed* to save bandwidth, but never discard your originals.

Over time, several things are a certainty:

1) Storage space will get cheaper

2) Bandwith will increase

3) Images and video from digital cameras will increase in resolution

and

4) People will consider lower-resolution media inferior.

Five years ago, 2048×1024 images were considered “huge”. But in the world of digital photography, 9600×4800 and larger images are becoming the standard. Lower resolution images are frequently considered unsalable.

Even Facebook has recently increased the size of their photo gallery images.

So feel free to play with the different cache sizes, but never delete or downsize originals.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gene53 – it might break the links from the thumbnails to the individual media items in an album.

To test it, you will need to upload six different size images. Each image smaller than one cache size level in the backend. So say 4000px, 1000px, 500px, 200px, 100px, and 50px depending on how you have the cache configured.

Then make sure links to all of them work.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Your question has been answered in this thread:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/bp-album-new-features-requests-and-discussion/page/8?replies=226#post-48414

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@jordashtalon

From PM Re: “

Awesome thanks for your help. I just realized I wasn’t on the latest Beta version ( I thought I was)

The new versions automatic thumbnails works really awesome.

I am noticing one bug, in the activity stream (domain.com/activity)

It shows the picture and everything, but the link to them is not working right it has this URL:

http://domain.com/members/admin/album/single-media/6/

When I browse to the picture itself using the “media” tab the url that works should be:

http://domain.com/members/admin/album/single-album/1/single-media/6/M/

(it’s also sometimes O instead of M)

Any ideas why that would be happening? Is this the best place to post these type of questions?

…

The activity stream bug was reported by @connor-mccarra this morning. We’ll fix it in the next beta, out in a few days.

The “http://domain.com/members/admin/album/single-album/1/single-media/6/M/” where the suffix may be T, P, S, M, L, or O is the plugin automatically selecting the best image size to fit in your template.

It has to account for some users uploading very large images, and some users uploading very small images, resulting in there may or may not being various downsampled sizes in the cache. It uses a nearest-fit algorithm to determine which size is closest to “medium” and serves that image.

All of this will be configurable in the backend, allowing different sites to be optimized for say, photographers -vs- mobile phones.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gene53 – Re “Is there code I could modify to show the latest pics in the albums first?”

In “bp-album-core.php” at line 246, add:

$args[‘ordersort’]‘DESC’;

This mod may have side effects. Do not deploy it on a live site without testing first.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@21cdb – Yes, that’s precisely what the high end templates are. And also with documentation to teach template developers how to modify them.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@jordashtalon

Re: “And the problem is that it seems almost like a redirect or something, the actual image is found in: /wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/album/12/filename.jpg”

There are actually *six* different versions of the image cached to that folder (the name of which is arbitrarily set by the site owner, so “wp-content” and “blogs.dir” may have different names) And then that’s stacked on top of the base URL for the site which may be any number of combinations of http://www.example.com/mediaURL or http://subdomain.example.com/foo/bar/wordpress/files/mediaURL

We’ve put a lot of work into making sure there are template tags that will return the correct URL to the right media file size.

I sent you a PM explaining how to navigate around inside the plugin and find functions that do things. If there are a lot of you out there that want to start hacking the plug-in, we might consider writing a short tutorial to help everyone.

Nice catch on the “Oh BTW Right Click + Save doesn’t work on the default BuddyPress Album Template because the hyperlinks hovering over the image itself ” thing though. Didn’t think of that…lol

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Gpo1 – I always thought “Right Click”->Save did that.

What would you like it to do? Email somebody the photo? Post it on Digg? Post it on social bookmarking sites, etc?

BP Album+ has 21 different template tags for getting a URL to an image and 39 different tags for getting image metadata ….all coded with love and fully documented!

Have a look at:

bp-album-templatetags.php

sub-album-templatetags.php

sub-media-templatetags.php

sub-meta-templatetags.php

While the plugin may *look* simple because we haven’t completed the “high end” templates yet, it’s sitting on a scary-powerful data infrastructure.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@paulhastings0 – thanks mate! We’re keeping our fingers crossed! I mean, think of the “awesomeness factor” of Google sponsoring our plugin. We are in contact with Andy & friends.

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@connor-mccarra – thanks! I know exactly what line of code we forgot to update…lol

^F^

[@foxly Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Xevo – We hear back from Google on April 26th, so I would guess, at most, 2 weeks after that.

I’d do it sooner myself, but I don’t want to cost @francescolaffi a summer job. (I don’t qualify for GSOC myself since I already work as a professional software developer)

Also, don’t forget that BP Album+ is completely open-source software, and you’re *encouraged* to hack it, rearrange it, and extend it with your own features.

We spent over 20 hours (= $1000 in billable time) documenting the source last week to make it easier for *you guys* to work with!

^F^