[Plugin: WP-Instaroll] "You need to configure…" message persists

Probably you forgot to enter, in the settings panel, the category to use to the tag stream.
Can you check for it and, it this is not the case, possibly provide a screenshot of you configuration panel (obviously without the app keys) and any javascript error reported by your browser.
Also, what browser are you using?

Thanx.

Ah – It is true, I left that field blank because I didn’t understand what its purpose was. And I still don’t. Does it mean that I have to start adding tags to all of my IG photos or else Instaroll won’t pick them up? But the description says “both from user stream and by using a specific search tag” which implies that I don’t need a tag.

My hope is that it would just show thumbs of all of my IG photos and let me select one or more to convert into a post.

Maybe some help text is needed on that settings field, or some documentation on the feature if it causes the plugin to not work?

Thanks much,
./s

That tag is is not used for retrieving your personal user stream.
The plugins retrieves two separate stream /that’s the meaning of the sentence you quoted):
– one is your user stream (this means: your photos + photos by the people you’re following)
– the other of is a stream of photos that have the tag you specified in the settings (so, that tag is used only for this purpose, not for your photos)

Hmm, OK, so I have to put something in that field, but I’m not sure what to put there. I tried putting in “foobar” and the plugin started working… sort of. Now, instead of an error message, the User Stream tab shows not my photos, but photos by strangers. And the Photos by Tag tab shows a different set of photos by strangers.

I also tried putting my own username in that field, but it didn’t cause it to show my own photos.

I only want to work with my own photos.

So… still don’t know what to put in that field to make it show my own photos.

Thanks if you can clarify.

As I said, there are two different set of photos the plugin retrieves:

1. user stream photos (first tab): here you can see your photos + photos by people you are following (they’re not strangers, but people you added as Instagram friends): this is exactly the same stream you see when using the Instagram application on iPhone or Android smartphones (this is Instagram standard way of working)
https://instagr.am/developer/endpoints/users/#get_users_feed

2. tag photo stream (second tab): photos (by everyone: you, friends and not friends) containing the tag you specified (ie.: if you use “beer” as tag, you’ll see photos about beer in the second tab). Again: this stream is completely unrelated to user stream and the tag you choose for this stream doesn’t affect what you see in the first tab: this is a sort of “bonus”, allowing you to search for themes you like, even from people you don’t know

PS. In a future update the tag search field is probably going to become optional.

Ahhh! I’m with you now. So the functionality I sort of assumed would be the primary use case (accessing just one’s own photos) is actually not supported at all. The problem with a view that includes both my photos and those by people I follow is that I might want to post a photo I took a week ago, and meanwhile my followees have posted hundreds or thousands of new images, making it very very hard to find my own photos.

If I had more time, I’d love to contribute code to this plugin, and create a third UI tab called “My photos,” but unfortunately I don’t. So I just modified line 153 of instagram.php, as follows:

$file_contents = @curl_file_get_contents(‘https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/12345/media/recent/?access_token=’.$accessToken);

Yes, that’s a horrible hack. I wanted to get the user ID in there dynamically, but it’s locally scoped in wpinstaroll_deal_with_instagram_auth_redirect_uri() and not available from within wpinstaroll_getInstagramUserStream(), so I had to hard-code my ID (you can find your IG user ID at https://yvesvanbroekhoven.github.com/get-your-instagram-user-id/ ).

And of course it would have been ideal to use your url translation system for this as well, but for now, I’m just going hard-coded. I know, yuck, but it works for now.

Would love to see a My Photos tab in the UI in a future version! Maybe I’m assuming wrong, but I would assume that that’s what 90% of your users will be looking for….

Thanks for all the work you put into this.

We’ll… I think it can really be easily inserted into next version.

I don’t know, anyway, if a third tab with only the users photos is the best idea. Wouldn’t it be better if there were a checkbox into settings (and, maybe, in first tab, too) for switching between user+friends stream (like now) and only users photos?

About the modification to the code, you can actually get the id dinamically: the plugin retrieves it during Instagram authorization and saves to the db, so you can read it with:

$instagram_user_id = get_option(WP_ROLL_INSTAGRAM_PLUGIN_PREFIX.’_instagram_user_userid’);

Sure, doing it as a toggle checkbox on the stream view would work as well. I’d probably have it default to NOT including other people’s photos, and let them turn that on with the toggle (how often does one want to blog about someone else’s photos? probably not often).

Thanks for the tip on getting the ID dynamically – that worked perfectly. For anyone following along and waiting for this feature, here’s the temporary solution – edit instagram/instagram.php and change line 153 (approx.) to these two lines:

$instagram_user_id = get_option(WP_ROLL_INSTAGRAM_PLUGIN_PREFIX.’_instagram_user_userid’);
$file_contents = @curl_file_get_contents(‘https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/’.$instagram_user_id.’/media/recent/?access_token=’.$accessToken);

Thanks FeliceMente!

I added the feature to version 1.1, that wil be out these days.

Works brilliantly! Thanks so much. Love it.

Next feature request: Rather than just creating a draft in the background and keeping the user on the list of photos, why not take the user directly to the draft writing page immediately?

Thanks again.

Nice, I’m really happy about it! ??

Regarding your suggestion, I think it’s a very good idea: I think I can add one more checkbox, near the “go to draft posts”, for enabling/disabling this behaviour.
It can anyway work also in case the user selected to directly publish posts.

Or this option could be in the Settings page instead, to help keep the UI uncluttered.

Adding it to photo streams panels is useful because that way the option is in the same place where it it actually used, but I think there’s no need to frequently change that option so it’s maybe actually better having it in general options, instead of adding one more options to photo panels.

Another options could maybe even better: I could change the post creation confirmation dialog with a nicer one, with two buttons (ok => will remain in current page; go to post => will go to just created post).

Wouldn’t it be better?

I think this is another case of understanding how users will really use the plugin. Can you imagine a common use case where someone would want to create drafts of image posts in the background, rather than selecting an image and writing a post around it immediately? I can’t.

Whatever is the most common use case should be the default behavior, with a possible override for people who use it in unusual ways.

Yes, I would have the dialog offer to take them directly to the post-writing page, because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do anything else.

I think it’s not so strange imagining one could create multiple draft (or direct post, if this option is selected), without going to the post at every import.