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BP Album+ || New Features Requests and Discussion


  • foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    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

    ======

    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^

Viewing 25 replies - 26 through 50 (of 346 total)

  • r-a-y
    Keymaster

    @r-a-y

    @Tosh

    You should point out that you’re using an external plugin for user points called CubePoints.


    draganbabic
    Member

    @draganbabic

    I think it would e useful if the pluggin (at least) offered an option to view the originally uploaded picture (full size), even if it’s a link to a jpeg.


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @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^


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @r-a-y – Thanks!

    Now we can have a look at it and maybe find a better place to add an action hook for him.

    ^F^


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    If in future release you can add video and audio then you’ll have your absolute canonical BuddyPress all round media plugin – and can hassle Andy to add it as core.


    Tosh
    Participant

    @xberserker

    So excited for Monday! :D 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
    Keymaster

    @apeatling

    Just off the top of my head I personally think the most important things to have in this plugin would be (with no regard for what is already done):

    – Upload one or multiple images in one go.

    – Add meta data to an image – title, description, date, geo? – perhaps just read the exif data too.

    – Allow the creation of albums, add/move/delete photos in albums and albums themselves.

    – Allow commenting on photos or albums (use the activity stream commenting system so it ties back to the stream and visa-versa).

    – 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.

    Once all that is done then these features would be cool:

    – 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.

    – Allow photo attachments on activity stream posts – extend the activity stream posting interface.

    Honestly though, before adding any bells and whistles, just make sure that uploading/editing/deleting a photo and album works perfectly. That’s the main thing.


    gpo1
    Participant

    @gpo1

    Here,here… on Andy comments


    zestylemon
    Member

    @zestylemon

    @foxly

    When you mentioned admin tags you said “For example, on a dating site that charges users to view or upload images”

    I’m interested to find out more about this / what functionality there is in BuddyPress to support payment or subscriptions. I’m looking migrate a site to BuddyPress but I need the option of giving paying members the ability to see user-contributed photos (and those that don’t pay don’t see the images or only a few of the images).


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @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^


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @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^


    Andy Peatling
    Keymaster

    @apeatling

    Thanks for the response foxly.

    We cannot post multiple thumbs to the activity stream because BP’s activity stream format only supports a single image attachment

    I’m not sure what you mean here. If you are calling bp_activity_thumbnail_content_images() then this might be causing it. If you don’t call this function on activity stream content then you are free to post however many images you like to the activity stream. If you have troubles with this let me know and I’ll see if I can fix.


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @Andy Peatling – Oh it is probably totally my mistake then! … I will review the code again and find what I missed.

    But yes, if we can attach multiple images to an activity stream post object, then we will *definitely* queue and batch images to the activity stream to avoid flooding it with posts. Probably implemented with a time delay mechanism..

    if(user has started uploading and has uploaded 5 pictures)

    [post first 5 pictures in session to activity stream]

    else

    if (user has started uploading and has not uploaded 5 pictures)

    && if (user has not been active for 10 minutes)

    [post all pictures uploaded in session to limit of 5]

    …or something along those lines.

    ^F^


    pcwriter
    Participant

    @pcwriter

    @foxly

    I’m loving the simplicity of your plugin so far!

    One essential (IMHO) feature that seems to be lacking, as far as user-friendliness is concerned, is centering of single-image or slideshow views on the user’s screen.

    With many themes, bp-default included, the header and top-of-page content forces the image “below the fold”, requiring the user to scroll down to view. When viewing multiple images in slideshow, this becomes very tedious, quickly.

    I’m no coder, but can anything be done to correct this?


    gpo1
    Participant

    @gpo1

    @foxly, Allow photo attachments on activity stream posts – extend the activity stream posting interface.

    Ask Andy for help on this..


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    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^


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @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^


    Boris
    Participant

    @travel-junkie

    Looks pretty slick, mate! As for your earlier question, I’m pretty busy with client work, but am more than happy to contribute to the project.


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @Travel-Junkie – Yes, we think it’s pretty cool as well.

    With regards to re-writing the code you’re contributing for image embedding in blog posts, yes go ahead and do that. We’re probably not doing the code merge for the 0.1.7 release until Saturday.

    If you want to include a shortcode embed function that lets users embed other people’s images, please include the following algorithm in that block of code:

    $test = bp_album_get_system_tag(‘user_id’, ‘image_id’, ‘@noembed’);

    if ($test == false)

    {allow image use}

    else

    {do not allow image use}

    Thanks!

    ^F^


    Xevo
    Participant

    @xevo

    @ fox

    That’s a lot o’ cats. :)

    Looking nice, cool that you’re implementing both flickr and facebook style.


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    I’d have to agree that’s a whole lot of cats!

    Backend looking very slick!


    foxly
    Participant

    @foxly

    @Xevo, @hnla – No matter what country they live in or what their personal opinions are, nobody is offended by kittens.

    Personally, I’d rather use bikini models, but… ;)

    ^F^


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    Yes that be nice but you would have to append a NSFW to the link :-)

    There must be someone offended by kittens somewhere surely


    gpo1
    Participant

    @gpo1

    Very impressive on the flickr… I hope someone can extend your plugin with photo attachments on activity stream posts – extend the activity stream posting interface.

    Job well done so far!


    modemlooper
    Moderator

    @modemlooper

    Can you throw in a widget for newest | popular images?

Viewing 25 replies - 26 through 50 (of 346 total)
  • The topic ‘BP Album+ || New Features Requests and Discussion’ is closed to new replies.
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