BP Album+ || New Features Requests and Discussion
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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^
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@21cdb – This would be possible to add by calling the BP Album+ upload action hook. If enough people request this we can certainly add it, but we’re basically just going straight down the list and implementing the features the most people vote for in order of number of votes.
@draganbabic – Thanks for the catch. I will fix that immediately!
*** See how much faster problems get fixed when everybody looks for them ?
***@bobin1983 – Batch uploading with the flash uploader is being considered for 0.1.8
@Gpo1 – Tagging is supported in the Monday release.
@Travel-Junkie – Disk space quota is being considered for 0.1.8.
As for EXIF and image rotation, once we have 0.1.7 released, the plugin will be using our new data model and we will be ready for other developers to contribute code.
Would you be able to write code that handles these functions and contribute it to the project?
@Tosh – In version 0.1.7 absolutely positively everything will have an action hook on it, so you can easily extend the plugin. It will also have “Production Grade” documentation, as you have seen we have done with the “template developer” version we posted last night.
We are very enthusiastic about documentation.
I mean, if we have 100,000 developers using this plugin and we can save each of them 15 minutes by having properly documented stuff, that’s 25,000 hours of development time that can be spent making BuddyPress better instead of being angry at the BP Album+ dev team!
^F^
So excited for Monday!
Thanks for looking into that foxly.This is the plugin I was referring to – https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cubepoints/
There documentation – http://techcube.net/docs/1.3/docs.html
It’s the only points system for WordPress Single Install
@Andy Peatling – Thanks for joining the discussion!
Here’s our feedback on your requests:
1) – Allow the creation of albums, add/move/delete photos in albums and albums themselves.
Most of this functionality will be included in the 0.1.7 Monday release. The only feature that may or may not be in this release is to re-order images within an album.
An important thing to understand is that our data model is fully tag-based. So in the database, both images and albums are essentially the same data type. To assign an image to an album we just add a tag to the image, and to create a new album we just say to the database “find me all the images with @tag”. This allows a single image file instance to be shared amongst thousands of albums if desired, saving tremendous amounts of disk space.
2) – Allow commenting on photos or albums (use the activity stream commenting system so it ties back to the stream and visa-versa).
We currently have this functionality working 100% in the current release.
3) – Add single photo uploads to the activity stream. If a batch has been uploaded or a new album created, show a gallery of thumbnails on one activity stream entry.
Single photo to activity stream works 100% in current release. Album post to activity stream will show the album’s lead photo. We cannot post multiple thumbs to the activity stream because BP’s activity stream format only supports a single image attachment, and we think generating a composite JPG or PNG of multiple uploads would seem strange to users.
4) – Add meta data to an image – title, description, date, geo? – perhaps just read the exif data too.
Meta data is added to the image using “System Tags” as described in our 0.1.7 features update. This means that not only does the image object contain all the standard data, template and plugin developers can add any other fields they want.
The function in pseudocode (not final version, we are still deciding on syntax) works like this: bp_album_add_system_tag(‘image_id’, ‘tag_name’, ‘tag_value’);
And then to read it back: $string_variable = bp_album_get_system_tag(‘image_id’, ‘EXIF_shutter_speed’);
*I will add EXIF data capability today, as two core developers have now requested it*
5) – Upload one or multiple images in one go.
We will try this out using the built-in WP flash uploader, but solving this problem properly for “photo sharing” communities is going to require considerable coding muscle. We need a “fault tolerant” uploader that can handle all sorts of network problems and ideally resize images on the *user’s* computer *before* sending them to the site.
6) – Tag members in a photo – add a “tagged in” sub tab to the albums tab that lists all the photos the user has been tagged in.
The function in pseudocode (not final version, we are still deciding on syntax) works like this:
bp_album_get_user_tagged(‘user_name’, ‘order_by’, ‘number_to_return’)
while (has tagged photos, the photo)
paginator, photo object data
(end loop)
7) – Allow photo attachments on activity stream posts – extend the activity stream posting interface.
This is the only one we don’t know how to do yet…
Thanks again Andy for giving your feedback on the plugin!
^F^
@zestylemon – There is no functionality in BuddyPress for payment systems and very limited functionality for paywall “Gated communities”. So although the BP Album+ has the ability for a plugin to add payment tracking data to its images, there is currently no payment plugin to do it.
Of course, you could always hire a plugin developer (hint, hint) to write you a plugin that does this.
^F^
LATEST STATUS UPDATE AND SCREEN SHOTS
Here is the latest screenshot of the plugin administration menu, showing the thumbnail generator, cache settings, and template setup:
http://foxly.ca/admin-screen-01.jpg
This is on a LIVE site. The options shown are actually working.
Here is the latest screenshot of a user’s home screen with the plugin operating in “Flickr Mode”. Again, this is a LIVE site using real images.
http://foxly.ca/flickr-mode-01.jpg
When you’re on a single photo page, the plugin loads EXIF data from the image file and displays it below the image. But that template isn’t finished yet so I can’t show it to you…
Don’t worry FaceBook enthusiasts… your template set is coming up next!
^F^
@pcwriter – In short: no, not with the default BP template. Our plugin gets loaded “inside” the BuddyPress template, so it is constrained by how that template is laid out. If you’re using a custom template though, then you can put the output from the plugin anywhere you want on the screen.
@Gpo1 – Adding media attachments in comments as implemented on FaceBook is a major project. It requires a substantial amount of JavaScript coding and quite a few new functions in the plugin backend. We’ll get to it when we can, or perhaps once we release version 0.1.7 maybe somebody might like to *extend* our plugin to add this feature …
^F^
@ fox
That’s a lot o’ cats.
Looking nice, cool that you’re implementing both flickr and facebook style.
Yes that be nice but you would have to append a NSFW to the link
There must be someone offended by kittens somewhere surely
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