donfink

I found a solution to the above problem, so I thought I would post it here in case someone else lands on this post looking for the same answer:

I saw this from a replay Wayne Allen made to another poster and tried it. It worked perfectly.

My problem was that I could not get Postie to set a publish date and/or time for some point in the future. I would fill out the “date:” parameter, only to be repeatedly ignored by Postie. Not matter what I entered after date:, the post would publish immediately.

According to Wayne, there needs to be a blank line above the line in which date: is written. It never occurred to me to do that since I had never seen anything mentioning that in the documentation.

Anyway, I tried leaving a blank line above the date: parameter and it worked perfectly.

I still have to do extensive testing to see if Postie will work in the exact way I would like, but being able to post at some point in the future is a big deal for me. Another biggy is to be able to attach images, but I’ve already tested that function and it worked perfectly in my case. From now on, when I run into a glitch in its behavior, the first thing I’ll try is to place a blank line above the offending, non-responsive parameter.

Thanks,

I’ll take a look at them shortly and see what I can come up with.

Hi stefanie,
I mentioned earlier that I wasn’t quite at the stage of working this all out yet, but I had a couple of thoughts about how one could go about putting together a user driven dynamic gallery.

I know that the first step would be to gather the information you’d need from the user. This could probably be as simple as designing a small form using HTML or very limited php on a page, collecting the user’s input in a variable, then passing that variable on to some NextGen shortcode that generates a gallery based on tags, descriptions, titles, and so on. I’m purposely being nebulous about specifics here because I’m so new to WordPress that I don’t really know all the possibilities yet. Working on it though.

I know that there are at least two ways to run php content on a page: One is to write a function and register it as a shortcode, and simply reference the shortcode on the page. The other is to install a plugin that allows you to directly place php in a page. The php could run a short search box, or whatever, and then pass that information on to a Nextgen shortcode that would go out and retrieve the images. There might be other ways to get php up and running on a page too. Like I said, I’m so new at this that I really don’t know yet. Running really simple php scripts doesn’t present all that much of a learning curve, or so says the guy who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but I’m optimistic that I’ll eventually get to a point where I can work this out.

Right now my current plan is to continue to move forward learning what I need to know in php. I need to learn how to collect data, then pass that along to a function (ultimately shortcode probably) that molds it into a shortcode for NextGen.

The biggest problem is that, as I unpeel this onion I find more and more possibilities so I’m reluctant to commit to a particular direction until I know more about what’s possible with WordPress. If this thread stays open, I’ll come back and report as I run into information that’s relavent to this issue. I would certainly appreciate hearing back if you learn more too.

I’ve noticed that I often find questions people left on a forum that somehow go unanswered, and I have thought, “I sure wish someone had answered that guy cause I wanted to know too.” Or the person will write back and say, “never mind, I found the answer”, and end the thread without offering an explanation. Then of course a year later, there’s this thread sitting on the forum that contributes nothing to the discussion. After all, I’m happy that you figured it out, but maybe I wanted to know too.

So, while I was waiting for someone to explain to me what the purpose of tags are in NexttGen galleries and albums, I ran across a start of an answer. I was trying to apply them to the normal situation of using tags from within the web site in a similar fashion to how tags are used for finding posts, and wasn’t getting anywhere.

It turns out that they work the same, but specific to images. In their simplest form, you can use tags to search out individual images you have scattered around your various galleries. But when you drill down a little bit, their true abilities come to light.

Tags, it seems, can be used to generate truly dynamic kinds of galleries and albums. Here’s a brief explanation of how they work here:
https://www.nextgen-gallery.com/tags/
Let’s say you have a gallery of Yellowstone, one of Rocky Mountain National Park, and one of Glacier National Park. And within those galleries, you have images of elk, and you have those images tagged as “elk” among other things. Now, if you wanted, you could create a gallery using shortcode and tags, looking specifically for elk, or a list of other critters, or just critters if that’s in the tags too, and you’d have a gallery based on tags that span across all your other galleries.

Of course, the next step would be to create a searchable gallery where a user could search the images themselves, but I’m not quite at that stage yet. Later maybe. Actually, now that know it’s possible, there’s probably something out there that tells me how to do it..

Easy Peasy!

Thanks for the reply Tizz,

I had come to the conclusions you mentioned by experimenting today, and started really thinking about how I was going to display the galleries. So they went into an Album for their major form of display with each linked to a page. That gives me the ability to format verbiage around them as necessary. Then, when I need to, I can still pull them out and display them in individual posts, or simply link them to individual posts. Of course, the main Galleries menu item displays all of them with room to grow into sub-albums from the menu in the near future. This way, when one gallery needs updating, it’s done from one source.

The difficulty I think is that, so far, I’ve avoided using static pages for some reason, and thought that I had to continue doing that. Don’t know why except that we’re still learning our way in terms of how we want this site to operate. There’ll end up being dozens and dozens of galleries as we move along, but when you think about it, they’re still kind of static in nature.

Take a look at the site if you have a minute:

https://www.hiddenmesa.com

It’s a little travel blog we’re just starting, and while there’s not much content on it yet, we’re rather pleased of it’s start.

I’ll start looking the reasons for the 404 errors suing your suggestions. You’re right that it shouldn’t be happening, and I really should find the cause before I get myself boxed into something that;s too hard to work out of. I was attracted to WordPress because everything just seemed to work when I started looking at it. Let’s try and keep it that way…

Thanks again,

If I could set up different text widgets for each page, wouldn’t I simply write in the code I need for them?

Obviously I need to look a little deeper into WP. good thing I’m doing all this on a test server.

Anyway, I think we’re going in circles here.

In the meantime, while I study this, I have found a plugin that seems to fit my needs. It’s called Graceful Sidebar. Really simple, and allows me to add HTML to the sidebar on each and every page at the time of page editing. Very direct, and very simple.

Next I’ll get back to something I saw a couple of days ago that lets me set up several different sidebars, and I’ll have what I need.

Thanks

Okay,

I had a look at Widget Logic, and as far as I can tell, I can decide in all kinds of ways where a widget will appear by using this plugin. As far as I can see, though, if I use the Text Widget, for example, to enter some HTML, all I can do is decide which pages that particular HTML will appear on. There’s no way I can see where to place different code on each page using the same plugin.

Part of the issue is that there’s no way to edit the code on the page itself. All the editing is done within the widget, then Widget Logic is used to determine which pages get the widget displayed.

Am I missing something here?

Okay,

I’ll look at it this afternoon.

Thanks.

Thanks for the input.

My understanding is that if I use the text widget, for example, and add some code to it, the same code will appear on each page where that particular widget appears. I would like to use something like the text widget to place different code on each page. I’ll look over Widget-logic more carefully later today to see if I can work out a process that enables me to do what I want.

I looked at one plugin called Graceful Sidebar that allows you to edit content for the widget on each and every page, and it would have been perfect except for the fact that you couldn’t add code. The author claims that you can after version 1.0.12 (current version is 1.0.15), but I couldn’t make it work.

Something that would enable me to make different VERSIONS of the same widget, like the text widget, would be perfect.