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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Hi there foxly & co. Just came by this project and I’m loving what I’ve seen thus far!
This upcoming release has me a little puzzled though. On your WP plugin listing, I the following features are supposed to be coming up next:
> multiple albums per user
> albums for groups
> shortcode embeddable photos
> cache integration
> clean uninstall command
The one I care the most about, by far, is albums for groups. I noticed many others have requested it in this thread as well. However I did not see it among your features listed for the next release. So, uhm, will I get to play with group-albums by Monday or not?
Amazing work is being done here mate, I hope to take a small part in the process.
@anonymized-96400
@Modemlooper – Yes, but not this week …
@Sadr – The features you listed off were the features from three days ago, when we uploaded that release to WP. lol.
Here’s the latest list:
FEATURES IN THE UPCOMING 0.1.7 RELEASE
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.
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#1, #3, and #4 are finished. We have also added:
5) Advanced image caching. The plugin has a 5-level cache with configurable JPG resolution and size.
6) Three different template sets, to mimic the functionality of Flickr, Facebook, and “Generic BuddyPress”.
7) EXIF data read. If the uploaded file has EXIF data, the plugin automatically imports it to the database.
We *had* to add image caching, because in testing we found that with even just a few people browsing the site, performance on a shared server would be unacceptably slow. If for example you were on a HostGator $12.95 a month shared hosting plan, it would be about TEN SECONDS per page refresh with 4 people browsing photo albums. Caching brings that down to 1 second per page refresh.
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…Still, just a heads-up that running large social networking sites requires *serious* computing resources.
For example:
-If your site has 1,000 users, and each user has 100 images of average size from a modern digital camera, it will require 200 to 300 GIGS of storage space to hold them.
-Regenerating the image cache on a site like that would take *two days* at 100% CPU usage on a 3.2 GHz dual core machine.
-If each of those images gets viewed 10 times, you’ll go through 2.5TB of data transfer, which equals a dedicated 10 Mbit connection running at full speed, 24 hours a day for an entire month.
-So just understand what you’re getting into if you’re thinking of being the next FaceBook …lol!
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@Travel-Junkie – I will try and get you a code snapshot later tonight so you can see what we’re doing. Thanks again for the help writing this feature!
@Modemlooper – We’ll try! After we get 0.1.7 our we’ll get everyone to shout-out the features they want and we’ll pick our targets based on popularity.
^F^
Thanks for the notice foxly. Still, I seem to not be getting it then. I have v0.1.6 installed on a WPMU BuddyPress install and all I can find is user albums. I expected group albums to pop up the same way the group wiki or group documents do, but no luck
@Sadr – What is confusing you is the difference between a “release” build and a “development” build.
We are using what are called “agile software development” methods [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development ] to decide on features, build, test, and revise our plugin software all at the same time.
By using a concurrent versions system [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(software) ] every developer on the team has their own version of the plugin with the features that they are adding.
So when I say that something is “done”, I mean that it has been written and tested but has not necessarily been released yet.
Every few days, the developers merge [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(revision_control) ] our code branches together, and create a “beta” release. We then post it on this forum to allow all of our stakeholders (you guys!) to test it.
After we are very, very sure that there are no bugs in the software, finally we post it as an “official” release on the WordPress plugin repository.
We must be VERY careful about the quality of official releases, because they are automatically broadcast to every current user of our plugin, and even the tiniest defect could crash *thousands and thousands* of people’s websites.
So, the version being offered on the WP plugin website is always many steps out of date.
We’re planning to do our next code merge on Saturday or Sunday and get the 0.1.7 beta out for testing on Monday night.
Considering that we’ve gone from *nothing* to this:
http://foxly.ca/admin-screen-01.jpg
http://foxly.ca/flickr-mode-01.jpg
in ten days, I think we’re doing very well!
^F^
@courtenayc – Thanks for the support!
It makes a long, long day of coding worth it when we know people like our work.
^F^
Thanks for your reply. And I apologize for my ambiguity. My question was more to satisfy my own curiosity than to anticipate any user demands.
Giving my users the ability to switch between templates is not terribly important to me at this time. And I would tend to agree with keeping layouts more on the uniform side… I can just see my inbox flooding with “how do I fix this” type of questions.
On the other hand, being a creative fellow myself – who really likes to fiddle with things, sometimes to the point of breaking them – I imagine many users would appreciate having the option to switch their album layout between 2 or 3 styles. (Of course, the lack of uniformity here could conceivably be cause for confusion among users.)
We are building communities. I believe our focus thus needs to be on what our community desires as a whole, rather than on the caprices of individuals. But who am I to impose my own beliefs upon others? Ultimately, if a choice can be made, it should be by the user.
My conclusion: keep it as admin-only for now – to get the next release out on schedule
. But let’s have some discussion about whether or not the option could – or should – be added to a future release.What say you gang?
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