I figured out the answers.
Firstly, the character encoding is easily solved: you just have to manually switch respective tables to utf-8 – and most importantly, not just the tables, but the fields also. Then works like a charm.
Secondly, I came up with this piece of code, to get the number of albums in the photo gallery. This way, you can see if there is any new albums uploaded:
<?php
$link = mysql_connect("localhost", "database user name", "pass");
mysql_select_db("select your database", $link);
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM wp_wppa_albums", $link);
$num_rows = mysql_num_rows($result);
echo '<ul><li><a href"https://www.kyohungariateam.hu/?page_id=7">' . $num_rows . ' album </a></li></ul>';
?>
The plugin author actually sent me a better solution later on, so here it is:
<p style="text-align: center;">
<?php
$count = wppa_get_total_album_count();
$y_id = wppa_get_youngest_album_id();
$y_name = wppa_get_album_name($y_id);
$p_id = wppa_get_parentalbumid($y_id);
$p_name = wppa_get_album_name($p_id);
?>
Er zijn <?php echo($count) ?> fotoalbums,
het laatst toegevoegde album is
<a href="<?php echo(get_permalink() . wppa_sep() . 'album=' . $y_id . '&cover=0&occur=1'); ?>"><?php echo($y_name); ?></a>
<?php if ($p_id == '0') echo('.');
else { ?>
, een subalbum van
<a href="<?php echo(get_permalink() . wppa_sep() . 'album=' . $p_id . '&cover=0&occur=1'); ?>"><?php echo($p_name); ?></a>.
<?php } ?>
</p>
Now, I haven’t checked this yet, but I guess that this would also work (and offers some additional features). Note that you need the latest version of the plugin for this to work!
