Craig Watson

Hi Jeremy,

Active plugins are:

• Breadcrumb NavXT
• Category Order
• Custom Post Templates
• Easy Popular Posts
• Global Content Blocks
• Google Analytics by Yoast
• Microformat Shiv
• Regenerate Thumbnails
• Sharing is Caring
• W3 Total Cache (note that we’re not using any minifying functionality)
• WordPress SEO
• WP-Sticky
• WP Missed Schedule

Plus two custom in-house plugins to integrate with Amazon S3 and our main website.

JetPack plugins that have been enabled are:

• Custom Content Types
• Extra Sidebar Widgets
• Jetpack Comments
• Shotcode Embeds

Note that we didn’t have any issues using JetPack or any of our plugins before WP 4.0 was released, and we have disabled wp_cron in favour of running a manual run via our server’s crontab.

Confirmed that the plugin doesn’t work with 3.9.1.

immw – can you let us know which file you reverted?

Hi mykkal,
Alex Rabe is working on getting the SEO changes into the body of NextGEN.

You may have noticed a database upgrade sneak through a couple of versions ago – this has laid the groundwork for full SEO of the gallery – albeit with one minor concession: there will be no “landing” page, everything will still come under /nggallery – but the album/gallery/image names will all be SEO-friendly.

Keep an eye on this ticket for more info: https://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery/issues/detail?id=223

I haven’t had any time recently after starting a job last October and then moving jobs at the beginning of April, so 90% of the credit should go to Alex for incorporating the code into NextGEN.

Craig

Quick progress update – v2 of my patch has been completed, though it won’t make NextGEN until v1.7, as Alex has already frozen features for v1.6.0.

If people are interested in testing v2, please post here or email me at [email protected]. Knowledge of patch files and database schemas are advised – though not required – the more independent testing I can do here, the less Alex needs to do in the future ??

Hi everyone,
Just an update to proceedings.

I have now started work on version 2 of the patch, however I think the best way to continue work is to submit code to Alex Rabe (NextGEN’s maintainer) to officially integrate, rather than releasing the patch as standalone.

The reason for this is that the v2 of my patch incorporates database schema updates, and these are best left to NextGEN itself to deal with – I don’t want to be responsible for people’s databases breaking on future NextGEN upgrades.

I will continue to support v1 of my patch here, but please be aware that there are problems/issues with it (discussed above) and it may not be a complete solution – though it has been proven to work with many people’s installations.

I hope to have v2 finished and submitted to Alex this week, so hopefully it’ll make it into NextGEN 1.6.0, due for release in two weeks.

Many thanks everyone,
Craig

Hi Michael,
My own gallery should be back up now – problem was my web-host switching to the Litespeed server and it treating my setup slightly differently than Apache did, I basically have a WP page and a folder of the same name, something that Litespeed doesn’t like!

Unfortunately my mod doesn’t go as far as image names, it just rewrites the gallery/album part of the URL. Hopefully when I get some spare time to work on the mod, I’ll be able to add this, but ideally I’ll be submitting a complete code change to Alex Rabe to release with NextGEN, as the changes needed are too complex to release as a standalone mod.

Hope that’s OK, sorry I couldn’t be more help, I’m in about 10 places at the moment!

Cheers,
Craig

@sjeng:

I’m not the main NextGEN developer – I’m just contributing the URL rewrite code.

The patch I’m supporting here is just that: a patch to the main NextGEN Gallery plugin to enable users to create SEO-friendly permalink structures.

The purpose of these structures is so that you don’t have to use linked pages to create a “nice” URL structure with nested albums being handled automatically by the URL rather than being explicitly linked within WordPress by pages.

A URL of https://www.example.com/gallery/holiday/london/zoo would automatically route to the appropriate place, without any “holiday”, “london” or “zoo” pages existing in WordPress.

Again, to clarify: my patch above is merely an unofficial modification to NextGEN, which I’m hoping Alex Rabe will incorporate officially when it has been tested enough ??

Cheers,
Craig

@gearsdigital:
You should be able to create nested albums, my website at https://www.cwatson.org is using one main “Gallery” album, with separate sub-albums acting as categories.

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@brightsides:
Page titles can be handled by a separate NextGEN plugin, available through the WordPress plugin system – the name is NextGEN SEO Titles I believe.

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@sjeng: The way I have designed the plugin is that there is only *one* page within WordPress that handles the gallery. From there, navigation is handled by the URL, using WordPress’ permalink rewrite structure to extract the full path to galleries/albums/subalbums.

Basically: you have a single gallery “homepage” and the plugin does the rest for you – so no subpages for albums etc.

If you would like text with each gallery, I would suggest using NextGEN’s description field. My plugin doesn’t alter any of the code output by NextGEN, just adds the permalink rewrite functionality.

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@fotoandy:
Similar to Sjeng above, my patch only provides URL rewrite functionality, it doesn’t alter any of the XHTML code output by NextGEN or WordPress. From your test URL, you seem to have the plugin installed OK and it seems to be working fine – the prefix slug seems to be “sets” rather than “fotosets”.

gearsdigital, brightsides, Sjeng and FotoAndy,

Thanks for your feedback, unfortunately I have a lot of freelance (paid) web development work outstanding at the moment and various personal situations that I need to deal with, so while I do really value the feedback, I’m unable to work on the plugin at this point – I’m trying to put as much on hold as I can to deal with everything.

I should be able to start work again on Monday 2nd August. In the meantime, I will try and provide support if needed, however it will be on a “if I have time” basis.

If anyone has the time to develop this fix further, please by all means email me at [email protected] or post here.

What I’m planning to do is develop a full “version 2” of my patch, and release it as I have done here – this will supersede v1 above, and (should) fix the problems you have all experienced.

This “v2” will involve changing the NextGen database schema to include a sanitised gallery name to solve the special characters problem.

I’ll address all of your problems individually in messages to follow. Thanks again for your feedback, hopefully you’ll bear with me.

Cheers,
Craig

Hi,
Cheers for the heads-up, I’ll add it to the things I need to check for v2 – which file was producing the errors?

Craig

Hi Aleks,
Just to keep you (and everyone else here) updated about this, unfortunately I have some freelance projects that need to be completed, so I won’t be able to address the issues until week beginning 19th July.

After this, I should hopefully be able to look again at the plugin and deliver a more “complete” solution – the characterset problems can be solved by sanitising the gallery/album titles in the same way that WordPress sanitises page/post titles.

To store sanitised information, extra fields need to be added into the database schema, so I’ll need to test these fully (including migration scripts) and release a “v2” of the patch – that is unless Alex Rabe releases them in NextGEN.

Cheers for all the help, please keep using the patch if you don’t mind having to avoid special characters and quotes in gallery/album titles.

Craig ??

Aleks,
Thanks for the feedback, glad it’s working for you ??

I’ve found some bugs with non-standard characters and quotes being used in album and gallery names, so these bugs have now been fixed. A proof of concept gallery for non-standard characters is:

https://www.cwatson.org/gallery/we_will_%22r%C3%B6ck%27_you/s%C3%B6me_g%C3%A3llery_with_l%C3%B6ts_%C3%B6f_specialchars_&_o%27er_%22stuffs%22/

As with previous bugfixes, you will need to update your permalink structure once after applying these fixes.

The archives in the first post have been updated, so you can either download the full archive or the changed files.

If anyone else can provide feedback (even a “it works!”) it would be much appreciated – I’m trying to save Alex as much testing as possible ??

Cheers,
Craig

I’ve also been bugfixing some problems with albums embedded in posts – seems to be the same problem you’re having.

I’ve fixed the bug so if you can replace the files again, and also update your permalink structure, the problem should be fixed.

I have a test post at https://www.cwatson.org/2010/07/07/test-gallery-post and that seems to be working fine ??

Apologies, I missed one file out of the changed files archive, so the options weren’t added into the admin panel.

I have replaced the changed files archive with the correct one so the problem is fixed now.

The way I had my gallery set up is that I have album/subalbum/gallery, all placed into a main “Gallery” album. Can you give your layout?

Update: I have uploaded a zip version of the archive, as well as just the changed NextGEN files:

https://www.cwatson.org/odd/nextgen-1.5.5-cw.zip
https://www.cwatson.org/odd/nextgen-1.5.5-changed.zip

I have also confirmed that the patch works on both the standard and ImageBrowser settings. If anyone spots any bugs or problems, please let me know ??