Comments on: Photo Sidebar widget

By: cellus

cellus — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:37:39 +0000

Roary,

Could you post the error message you see?

By: roary

roary — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:46:50 +0000

I can’t get it to work it tells me theres an error on line 140

By: cellus

cellus — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 03:40:29 +0000

I have released version 1.22 of the plugin via the WordPress plugin repository. This version adds pixelpost support and truncated captions. This should be the last release of version 1.0; I’m now working in earnest on some of the more glamorous potential features that may justify a “major” version number such as caching and multiple instances.

By: cellus

cellus — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 03:36:14 +0000

Great–it’s exciting to see the “multiple instances” in action, even if it’s not a pretty workaround. If nothing else, it’s good motivation to come up with a more eloquent solution. Thanks for the suggestions!

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:20:21 +0000

I can’t tell you how appreciative I am for all your help. I’ve got three feeds going, now, exactly as I’d hoped to do — one that displays the Top10 most popular, and then two separate feeds that display random color and black/white images from my professional galleries. Thank you!!

By: cellus

cellus — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:13:51 +0000

It’s a little more difficult than that–the software will complain because even though the file has a different name, it’s still looking in the same place for settings. My temporary workaround is to rename the functions and variables in the new file to make them unique. It’s a little tedious but I found a version where I had done just that. I have uploaded it: photo_sb2.zip.

To get, say, a third instance, you could make another copy of this file and replace the 2 with 3 on any function/variable names. For example widget_photo_sb2_init(), widget_photo_sb2, rand_compare2. Using the “find” command in my editor, I found 68 places where the 2 would be replaced with 3 (etc.).

Naturally, any other changes you would make (disabling the random sort, etc.) would need to be done in each file.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:36:11 +0000

Perfect! — I’ll work on setting the random piece to just display the ten most popular photos; as for multiple instances… if I just manually copied the widget two more times with different names, and enabled all three under WP Plugins, would that serve as a viable workaround?

By: cellus

cellus — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:15:29 +0000

Good, I’m glad it was a simple solution…you had me worried!

As for you other two questions…I have worked on the multiple-instance problem before and so far a clean solution (i.e., one that hasn’t required dealing with the database manually) has eluded me. Hopefully I can come up with something user-friendly in a future version.

You can easily disable the random function by commenting out the usort command on line 130; then the widget will show the first x images. Or with a little more tweaking, that line could be used to sort based on other data from the feed, such as the date the photo was taken.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 12:45:14 +0000

Hah! That was it… it didn’t even occur to me it was something other than the new code. Thanks, again (as well as for the compliment). I do have two last questions, as long as I have your ear! [1] Do you know how easy it would be to allow more than one widget instance of the plugin? (e.g., with the text widget, you can choose to have ‘x’ number — and while I know I can add multiple feeds, I’d love to separate a few of them out with different titles). [2] Is it possible to only display the first ‘x’ images in a feed? (e.g., for the popular gallery feed, instead of choosing ‘x’ images at random, maybe just display the ‘x’ *most* popular). Thank you again!!

By: cellus

cellus — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:46:32 +0000

Mark,

It looks like the feed url’s have been copied into the widget title. Check your settings page to see if the Title field has been overwritten–with luck, it has and changing it back will solve your problem.

I’m fairly confident that should work but If it doesn’t help, I would grab a fresh copy of the plugin, make sure it’s working as expected and then make the changes above again.

By the way, your site is fantastic–I’m honored that this plugin is working well for you!