How about if the thumbnails popped up when you rolled-over the numbers? Or maybe small thumbnails instead of numbers that popped up on rollover?

But what do I do about the photo caption? There's going to be a lot more room for text in Exhibit 2.0. And for comments...

Ok, the new code is up. I realize that I'm talking to myself here, but the new popup puts tiny thumbnails at the bottom. When you mouse-over the thumbnails, a big overly appears over the current image with the normal-sized thumbnail and the caption text for the image. If you click on the mini-thumbnail, the regular-size thumbnail goes away and you're left with just the caption floating over the full-size image. At least, until you move the mouse.

This isn't clean for IE yet. I will get it there somehow.

Ok. Someone else say something before I go crazy.

One small addition I'd like to see (besides the next/prev), is the ability to have the comments appear below the main preview, instead of below every thumbnail.

I'd also like users to be able to leave a comment for a specific image within one post. Not sure if that would even be feasible though; in my mind, it would call for some pretty serious modification of the WP structure.

I really like the idea of the gallery stucture of 2.0. One great feature that I'd like to see in this new structure is the ability to browse all photos in every folder in one slideshow. By slideshow, I simply mean being able to hit next/prev, and go from the first picture in the first collection/folder, all the way to the last picture in the last collection/folder. Hope that makes sense. This way, users can still browse around your site and look through your individual posts and collections, but with this option, they could also choose to view all of your photos in one long sequence, one-by-one, like a traditional photoblog. I love the uniqueness of my setup, but I've often thought about setting a traditional photoblog up as an option, and having this integrated in Exhibit would make me do flips.

Also, and possibly most importantly, I'd like to be able to upgrade to this radically revolutionized system without it messing up posts from my previous version of Exhibit. I'm sure you already have this well in hand, though.

I'm really excited about this, Owen. Thanks for all your hard work. :)

Oh...by "comments", I meant the "captions" for each picture. Sorry.

Well, I'm planning some XMLHttpRequest stuff for the new system, so hopefully I'll be able to integrate that enough into the output display that you'll be able to prev/next your way through all of your galleries.

The way I have galleries planned for Exhibit is this: You build galleries from your filesystem (any of the virtual filesystems). These galleries are indexed on the special gallery theme page. You could also access the galleries in the Exhibit virtual file system.

For example, if you already organized a series of photos from different physical directories into an Exhibit gallery, and then you wanted to write a post that links to a subset of those, you'd just open the gallery in the Image Browser (shown in teh animation above), and pick the photos you want to attach to the post.

I'm still deciding whether it's best to attach comments/captions to the photos or to their outputs. If the latter is used, then comments in the gallery would not appear in the posts and vice-versa. Hmm...

I thought of another cool feature: support for video files such as .mov, .avi, and .wmv. :) I don't think it would be too hard to impliment. Just make sure that you can create custom thumbs for each video file. This isn't a feature that I would use immediately, but I have a project coming up in the near future that this feature would be perfect for.

Yeah, most galleries that support video just have a generic icon of, for example, film or a camera, that is used for video, or a speaker for audio. Ideally, you'd be able to tell an interface what frame of the video to capture a thumb from. My thoughts were just to allow manual insertion of the thumb.

Any ideas on how to make thumbs for video? You could do it manually, sure, but automatically?

wow I must be special ;-) hehe

Well I will have to get back to you on this, see if I can think of something. :)

One thing though, I think I mentioned this before - I'm not sure if, at least with my installation, when you delete a post that the associated images in the Exhibit table are also deleted. I've had broken images in my random image before only to look at their date (I name them by the date of which post they are originally linked with) and find out that the post has been deleted and I also deleted the images but the referrence stayed in the table. See what I mean here?

Ok, so we have manual insertion of thumbnail (which would work for any file type, not just movies, although there should probably be some way of playing back movies via Exhibit) and deletion of Exhibit info when associated posts are deleted. Ok.

Oh I just thought of this, too... Okay currently in Exhibit you can click on the < > and have the image code put into the text of the blog, right? The issue I've found with that is that it never gets the path to the image right.

It will put something like spoken-for.org/2005/jan/2005-01-03a.jpg when in reality the address should be spoken-for.org/images/wp/2005/jan/2005-01-03a.jpg.

But now that I write this I think maybe this is my fault in my configuration or something... I have this for the image root, maybe that's wrong... imagedir='images/wp' ??

Yeah, I think it's not supposed to do that. That is, it's supposed to insert your imagedir value into the URL that it uses for the image tag. I wonder if this even works on my system. At some point it must have, otherwise what was the point in including it, eh?

The new Media Browser thingie has that dropdown area under the image. There are buttons there that insert the image directly into the post in any of the available sizes.

I'm just bursting with ideas here. :P

When a thumbnail is clicked, as an option, instead of causing the page to refresh and load a different image for the preview area, what if it just switch the source of the main preview image without refreshing, using an "onclick/swapimage-target" type function?

I guess you didn't look at the popup demo? :(

Use Firefox. IE support is still sketchy, but coming.

I did look at it, but I didn't realize that is what it was doing. Nice.

Personally though, I'd prefer to have that functionality directly in the post.

Oh yeah the new popup is totally cool :-)
What if - though - the list of images is too long to fit, is there a way for them to scroll the thumbnails from side to side? (unless you already addressed this...)

I think I could swing that, considering the code will already be mostly written.

Maybe I should fade out the current image, show a "loading" graphic of some kind, and then fade in the new one? That sounds fancy. :D

My overriding goal is to make Exhibit too attractive to WordPress users for them not to use it.

That would be really cool... :-)
Oh take a lookie at this. Not something I wrote, of course, but I really like it...

I'm going to add "template tags" to this version of Exhibit, so that people who don't like the automated layout stuff can roll their own. Presumably you could use these template tags to output a list of files that any Flash applet could draw from - even the XML format that PostcardViewer uses.

Can you put that functionality directly in the posts, though? (*nag *nag *nag)

I don't know if it's possible, but I can try. Maybe only on single posts, and not in post listings. I'll have to see.

The new bug database is set up here.

Hey, that's fine if it only works in single posts; that's the only place I would use it, at least. This is not a high priority feature, either, at least as far as I'm concerned; nor is the video capability. I'm just giving you some input. The things I would like to see most are the next/prev links and the ability to flip through all of the images in all of the folders in the images directory in a single interface, like a traditional photoblog.

The photocropper is an awesome feature, too; that's one of the features that I had a terrible time giving up when I dropped the Menalto Gallery for Exhibit. I just never requested it because I thought it would be too much to ask. But now that you're developing it anyway, it's one of my top requests. :)

Well, I've got a couple of suggestions after reading all of this.

First, I would definitely love the ability to post a video. For a while now, I've wanted a simple way to do this, or at least much easier than having to do it from scratch.

Second, it would be extremely nice to have a feature that is only in the post when you click it to view the entire thing, like this page when you want to post a comment. When the images display at the top or bottom of the post, it would be nice to be able to click one of the pictures that is still a thumbnail and have it load into a larger picture directly above without having to reload the page and scroll down. Thus, it would enable a more user-friendly gallery experience.

Not sure if any of this is do-able, but I sure would love to be able to have it one my site.

Thanks

It's certainly doable. The question is how to do it so that most people are satisfied and so that there are a bazillion options to set just to get a picture to show up.

When I've solved that one, I'll let you know. ;)

How recently has that "asy" experimental version been changed? I downloaded and "asy" version about a month ago, but I just saw it pop up on your hacks page today.

It hasn't changed - I never added it to the hakcs page after I posted it to the WP forum. I figured that others might be looking for it than just those on the forums, so I added a link.

hi owen!

I was just recently thinking about exhibit, because I want to go a little more photoblog with my blog (but not ONLY photoblog). My fear was about investing time in something which maybe breaks with the next WP upgrade...

So I'm very glad to see development going on! exhibit was great the way it was and I guess it can only become better ;) after reading the above my wishlist is as follows:
- doesn't break existing posts with upgrades of WP or exhibit (maybe at least for the next 1 or 2 years -nobody can keep up volunteer work forever :)
- settings in WP admin instead of exhibit.cfg
- for image scaling: consider both height and width for maximum size, so portrait fotos don't get larger than landscape ones (or did I miss something and it already does this?)

so long and thanks for the BIG fish!
chris

Well, I'm still thinking about how I'm going to accomplish keeping the versions compatible, but it's my intention to at least provide an easy way to convert from the old way to the new.

Settings for the new version in development are already in the WP admin, so no worries there.

The existing resampling code alrady takes into account both height and width, but it resizes photos in their aspect ratio so they don't look distorted. That's why portrait and landscape photos of the same but rotated dimensions aren't the same height and width after resampling.

Do you think there should be an option to choose to absolutely resample based on either height or width? That way, all of the thumbnails could be, for example, the same height, even though their widths could be wildly different. Would that be helpful? There are already methods to sort out this issue a little using CSS, which is why I wonder if it's really neccessary.

Owen, I'm verry exited about 2.0! I have git a Grafic-Design Portfolio on my german website and it would be nothing without Exhibit. For me it would be nice if the thumbnails would not appear if a post ist password protected because some Ad-Agencys don't like it when i post my Work for them to the whole world. I think this would be nice for private Pictures too.

The next prev links are also on my wishlist like the ability to easily select a larger number of pictures for posting. Now in 1.1d you must click on a picture to post it, and after that you must scroll down in this little window to the next picture and so on...

I've also had some Errors with 1.1d: Exhibit calls it's own CSS File. But I didn't youse a single CSS for Exhibit so that it calls nothing. Because of this little CSS-Call i had some Problems with the new Kubrick-Template for 1.5: It didn't use different background images for Single- and Main-Pages. I just deleted the call in Exhibits and :-)

so long, THANKS for your work!

Not displaying thumbnails on private posts is an important addition. I'll also have to consider what to do with RSS feeds - I've been thinking that photos should optionally be added to the feeds as enclosures so they can be picked up by feed aggregators.

I'm considering ways of re-implementing the display aspect of Exhibit to be more "pluggable", like the file selection routines. It might be nice to be able to add additional display methods to Exhibit by dropping in additional plugins.

Selecting pictures easily is a priority for me - I really hate that the page reloads on every picture you add. The new stuff will use some crazy javascript so that the page doesn't need to reload to insert things. It should do nicely for everyone.

I think all of the Exhibit CSS is going to be chucked in the new version. Exhibit won't insert its own CSS into anything. Instead, you'll have to modify your theme's CSS to add any styles you want to use for Exhibit. I'll build a base set of CSS rules you can follow. This will be better than the current setup because it will allow you to style your photo layouts differently within each theme.

I also want to get an idea of how many people are using Exhibit, so I think I'm going to put together a blogroll here where people can link to their Exhibit-enabled sites. Depending on some other feature ideas I'm cooking up, this could even work something like a distributed Flick, based on everyone's WordPress and Exhibit installation.

owen, about thumbnail sizes: you are right of course.

in my layout I'm forcing 'preview' pics (on frontpage) via CSS to be only 200 px wide. on a single post page 'thumbnails' are shown at thumbnail size 400px. full size is available via popup from single post page. I completely forgot about this. :) consequences are: on the frontpage pics are always 200 px wide - no matter if they are portrait or landscape. that's btw the drawback from using CSS for scaling pics further down.

to make it short: forget about it - I was confused... and since you added an additional intermediate size my whole objection is definitely obsolete :))

and regarding your question:
absolutely fix width OR heigth -> maybe nice to have...
square crop thumbs -> could be quite sexy :)
but neither is a real necessity.

thinking again: how about an EXIF reader? no, just kidding, it's gonna be great anyway! :)

thx again, chris

Oh not sure if you remember when we talked about posts that are still in draft status that their photos don't end up in the random image? Or maybe you already did that - I haven't had to do that lately...

Well, the thmb cropping stuff is done; check this out. All that's left now is color-correction and red-eye removal. (No, that's a joke...)

I added some really cool stuff to the insertion "engine" yesterday. I'll have to take a capture of that soon, too.

EXIF readers are overrated unless you've got a camera that really uses that info - Still, I was pretty sure I included some EXIF functions in Exhibit 1.1. You neede to have some library available, though, and I can't recall at this moment how that worked. Obviously, I don't publish EXIF data.

Hmm... Random image. I can beef up the random image function to do that, maybe. Or I could have it pull from galleries instead of post pictures. I'll have to think about how to do that.

nice to hear! ummm, allow me one last (?) question: do you have a rough idea when the thing will be ready for release? or do you need beta testers?

No, I don't know when it'll be ready for release.

Yes, I will definitely need alpha/beta testers.

Keep an eye out around here for more info on that when I make it available.

A note about Exif data...I would LOVE to have the ability to show details about shutter speed and aperature, lens used and such, below each picture.

The only suggestion that I have for now is creating some sort of documentation for Exhibit. I'm glad I had the wordpress forums to find help, but it took me a long time to get Exhibit configured in the places that I wanted it. I didn't realize that PHP can't be running in CGI mode, or it won't work. I had to fudge around with the chmod permissions, etc. It would be great to have a place where all of this stuff is laid out. I know I personally didn't have a problem with this, because I have it, but I noticed a couple of people not realizing that you need GD in order for the extension to work.

Otherwise, when it works, I love the extension. Excellent work, and the dedication to support is greatly appreciated.

Documentation in the new version will be sparse, but it will be present, and yet hopefully not as necessary.

One of the main problems with the current Exhibit is that all of its configuration stuff is in a file that people don't know to look at. I find that with many of my earlier plugins - even if there's only one file to look at - people just expect to drop it in and turn it on. If it doesn't work, they'll walk away. The more complex a plugin is, the less likely that's going to happen, and Exhibit is pretty darn complex. Even if you have an idea of what you're doing it can be hard to configure.

Fortunately, I'll be moving most of the complicated stuff in the new version to the options page. I will document well anything I can't make as easy as toggling a selection, and I will provide at least a description (like in the current config file) of what each option does.

Thanks for stopping by. If you think of any new features or complaints about existing ones, feel free to comment again!

So *very* happy to see the thread in the support forum that links to this discussion. Thanks for your ongoing development efforts with it.

I've been toying around with Exhibit 1.1d for use in a portfolio site (graphic design/illustration/web design/writing/etc), where each item DETAIL needs some accompanying explanation ("the problem was BLAH. We solved it BLAH BLAH").

So the "keep the window as small as possible" and plop the description on top of the image isn't big on my list (though on its own, it's quite spiffy to look at in your pop-up sample). I'd like text to display below, and have the option of a single explanation over multiple images in a series (e.g. image 1 2 3 4 5) or explanaton that is both single for all, and then a blurb for this particular individual image.

I can't say as I've gotten the second display method (other than pop-up) to work to my satisfaction (I'm oh-so-novice w/ PHP, so I can recognize and solve PHP parse errors and do a few other things, but cannot grok the workings of the exhibit10.php file too easily). I've debated about whether creating custom fields and then plopping the contents thereof onto the page might do what I'd like to do.... But, er, well, I run into my limits of coding really fast. Like immediately.

Already I see how this can be applied on other sites I'm wokring on. If I can get it to work. I'm also looking at other CMSes (Expression Engine) to solve the portfolio problem. Showing individual pop-up images in Exhibit is okay, but once I have to display text, I'm getting outta my league.

Hope these comments help!

Yes, these detailed thoughts on how to accomplish annotations on images will be very helpful while I form the final plan of what Exhibit will do.

I can't promise anything specific, but I'd like to solve as many problems as I can. Hopefully I can think of a way to make this work. What I have in mind (just a snap reaction at this point) is that you could add images to an Exhibit gallery, then add whole galleries to the post with a single description. Each gallery image would also (possibly) have its own description.

The inconvenient aspect of such an interface would be that you'd have to create the galleries separately from creating the post. I wonder how inconvenient this would be.

In any event, it's becoming more clear to me that the popup window is going to need a lot of love to make everyone happy. I'll have to consider how to allow for different style popups and include a method to select one.

Keep in mind that the only part of the admin interface I've shown so far is the Media Browser...

Now that WP1.5 is out, you should make some sort of statement about whether 1.1d supports it or not. There's no real definative information either on the wp-hacks page, or in the readme.

Mike

Like mike, I think it would be pretty cool to know if 1.1 is supported by 1.5 or not. Based on my experience, I would say that out of the box - "not", thought I have picked up some noise in the WP forums about how to get it working. I haven't bothered because I was so interested in the plans you are making for exhibit 2.0. Which brings me to my next baseless demand.

Could you possibly give a rough estimate as to when E2 will be released? Just a rough hint: Will it be a few

a)weeks
b)months
c)financial quarters

It would help me and others I am sure who are debating about wether to invest in another solution or wait for image salvation with E2.

David,

I don't know whether or not it is officially supported but when I upgraded to 1.5 and copied exhibit back into the directory, simply deactivating and reactivating the plugin was enough to get everything working again. You can see exhibit working on the WP 1.5 install here. I believe that this site also uses WP 1.5 though I could be wrong about that.

-- Casey

Hi,

On my Wish-List are two points:

First one: Passwordprotection not only for the wordpress-post, but also for the image-gallery.

Second one: Fully functionable with static pages.