MT-PhotoGallery: A Movable Type Plugin
Current version is 1.1.1.0 released on 2005-09-04
Contents
- What This Plugin Does
- Requirements
- Installation Instructions
- Image File Name Convention
- How To Use The Tags
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Examples
- Donate
- License
- Download
- Version History
- Contact
What This Plugin Does
This plugin gives you a new set of Movable Type template tags. These tag will allow you to display a list of image files on your web server formatted in a manner of your choosing.
Requirements
- This plugin works with Movable Type version 2.x and 3.x.
- Perl version 5.8.5 or higher. This is what I use. It may work on lower versions. Let me know if it does and I will lower this.
- You must have the Perl module, Storable, installed.
- This plugin will only work in static (not dynamic) templates.
Installation Instructions
- Download the latest version of the plugin.
- Unzip the contents of the file.
- Copy the file PhotoGallery.pl to your Movable Type “plugins” directory. (If you don’t have a plugins directory, create a plugins directory in the same directory where your mt.cgi file is located. Then upload PhotoGallery.pl into the newly created plugins directory.)
- Add some combination of this plugin’s tags into a template file. Movable Type plugin tags DO NOT work in blog entries. They must be inside of your template file. Most folks create a new template file to display their photos. See some of the examples below to get started. (For advanced users, there are ways to make plugin tags work inside of entries.)
- Give me some credit. You have many choices. Do one or all! 1) Add a trackback link to this page on your page. 2) Donate so that I continue to enhance this plugin.
Image File Name Conventions
In order to have the plugin automatically display a title and a date, I chose to have it get the information from the file name itself. Therefore, a file name convention was created to help in the extraction of the data. YY or YYYY is the year. MM is the month. DD is the day. EXT is the file extension. Any underscores in the TITLE will be replaced with spaces. The * indicates that you can add other characters that will be ignored in its place. The following conventions can be used:
- YYYY-MM-DD––TITLE.EXT
- YYYY-MM-DD*.EXT
- MM-DD-YY*.EXT
- YYYY_MMDD*.EXT
- YYYYMMDD*.EXT
- YYMMDD*.EXT
- TITLE.EXT
- *.EXT
How To Use The Tags
This plugin will only work in static (not dynamic) templates.
- MTPhotoGallery
A container tag representing a list of images from your server. The default is to display the images from your local site path in your weblog configuration. To alter this behavior, you can provide one of the following attributes:- debug=”0|1”
The default value is 0. Set the parameter to 1 if you are having trouble with your configuration. Helpful for diagnosing path problems or other issues. - silent=”0|1”
The default value is 0. Set the parameter to 1 if you want the plugin to silently exit, which returns nothing, when it doesn’t find the directory you specified. Some users utilize this method for building photo galleries based on blog entries that may or may not have photos associated with them. - path=”dir”
By default, the plugin will use the site path and URL from your weblog’s configuration for finding the image files. If you want to override that behavior, specify this tag to force the plugin to use this path as the directory for the image search. Specify this as a relative path from your site URL. - recursive=”0|1”
Set this parameter to 0 if you do not want the plugin to recurse into sub-directories that it finds. Setting it to 1 or omitting the parameter will force it to recurse. - count=”n”
Set the value of this parameter to an numeric (integer) value if you want to limit the number of pictures displayed. - sort_order=”ascend|descend|random”
Specifies the sort order for this particular tag. Valid values are ascend, descend and random. - exclude=”expression”
This parameter allows you to exclude files that contain expression from the listing. - extension=”expression”
This parameter allows you to specify the exact extension of files that you want to appear. You can set expression to a single extension like jpg or you can allow multiple extensions by separating like jpg|bmp|gif|png. A dot is assumed to be present before the extension that you specify so do not add that leading dot into your expression.
- debug=”0|1”
- MTPhotoGalleryImageDate
The date of this image. This value is parsed from the file name if available.- format=”%B %e, %Y”
Use the standard Movable Type date formatting commands described in the User Manual.
- format=”%B %e, %Y”
- MTPhotoGalleryImageDateExists
A container tag that conditionally generates its contents based on the existence of a value in MTPhotoGalleryImageDate.- state=”0|1”
If 1, then tag shows output when value exists. If 0, then tag shows output when value does not exist.
- state=”0|1”
- MTPhotoGalleryImageLink
The full URL of this image. - MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName
The name of the image file without path. - MTPhotoGalleryImagePath
The relative path of the image from your site’s root. This tag is normally used to feed data into other plugins, such as MTEmbedImage. It does not include the file name. If you need that, concatenate the MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName to this tag. - MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle
The title of this image. This value is parsed from the file name if available. - MTPhotoGalleryImageTitleExists
A container tag that conditionally generates its contents based on the existence of a value in MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle.- state=”0|1”
If 1, then tag shows output when value exists. If 0, then tag shows output when value does not exist.
- state=”0|1”
Frequently Asked Questions
- Q: How is this different from the Gallery application?
A: Gallery provides a way to build online photo albums with lots of different features, such as comments, organization structures, etc. Folks who use Gallery often post their pictures to Gallery and then write up a blog post that references the picture. However, this plugin is meant for those people who have a different usage model for photos. Many like to upload pictures through Movable Type’s Upload File feature and have the blog posting be the “home” of the picture. This plugin allows you to aggregate all those photos into something for easy viewing. (If you just want Gallery to look like Movable Type, I found one article on that.) - Q: Can I embed other Movable Type tags within the arguments of this plugin’s tags?
A: Yes, as of version 0.50. Use the standard syntax of arg=”[MTTagName]” to do this. - Q: This plugin (and others) don’t seem to be working on my server. Why?
A: Internally, Movable Type requires some Perl modules to be installed for plugins to work. Some servers do not have these modules installed by default. Please run mt-check.cgi on your server to find out what you are missing. - Q: How can I change the output of tags such as the MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle? I want to strip off certain words or characters.
A: Use MT-Regex. Regular expressions allow you to parse, strip or modify the string according to a pattern. The trick is figuring out the pattern to use for your case. For an example, let’s say that you have 8 random digits appended to the front of your image name and you want to get rid of those.<head> ... <MTRegexDefine name="randomstripper">s|\d{8}(.*)|$1|g</MTRegexDefine> ... </head> <body> ... <MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle regex="randomstripper"> ... </body>
Examples
1. In this simple example, we create a page that lists out all the images in a big table format.
<table>
<MTPhotoGallery>
<tr>
<td><MTPhotoGalleryImageDate></td>
<td>
<a href="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>">
<img border=0 width=150 src="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>">
</a>
</td>
<td><MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle></td>
</tr>
</MTPhotoGallery>
</table>
2. Same as the last example except we specify a specific directory to use. Be sure to substitute in your own directory path.
<MTPhotoGallery path="/photos/2003/"> <img src="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>"> </MTPhotoGallery>
3. This example shows how to create a random photo each time the page is republished. You can setup an automated cronjob to build the page if you want to auto-update the picture every day.
<MTPhotoGallery sort_order="random" count="1"> <img src="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>"> </MTPhotoGallery>
4. This example shows how to create a link to search for all posts that contain the picture.
<MTPhotoGallery> <img src="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>"> <a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>?search=<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>">Find related posts</a> </MTPhotoGallery>
5. In this example, we utilize the MTEmbedImage plugin to create the list of images but with auto-generated thumbnail files. Its important to have the exclude parameter match the thumbsuffix parameter or else you will continue to generate thumbnails of the thumbnails over and over. Warning: Pay special attention to the basename parameter passed in to MTEmbedImage. You may or may not need the slash in between the [MTPhotoGalleryImagePath] and [MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName] depending on your weblog configuration.
<table>
<MTPhotoGallery exclude="-THUMB">
<tr>
<td><MTPhotoGalleryImageDate></td>
<td>basename = <MTPhotoGalleryImagePath>/<MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName><br>
(If duplicate slashes (//) appear, correct the basename parameter by removing a slash.)
</td>
<td>
<MTEmbedImage basename="[MTPhotoGalleryImagePath]/[MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName]" width="150" thumbsuffix="-THUMB">
<a href="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>">
<img src="<MTEmbedImageThumbFilename>"
width="<MTEmbedImageThumbWidth>"
height="<MTEmbedImageThumbHeight>"/>
</a>
</MTEmbedImage>
</td>
<td><MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle></td>
</tr>
</MTPhotoGallery>
</table>
6. In this example, we utilize the grid plugin to create a multi-column layout of images.
<table align="center">
<MTGrid num_columns="6">
<MTPhotoGallery>
<MTGridCell>
<MTGridIfLeftColumn><tr></MTGridIfLeftColumn>
<td>
<a href="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>">
<img src="<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>">
</a>
<center><MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle></center>
</td>
<MTGridIfRightColumn></tr></MTGridIfRightColumn>
</MTGridCell>
</MTPhotoGallery>
<MTGridTrailingCells>
<MTGridIfLeftColumn></tr></MTGridIfLeftColumn>
<td> </td>
<MTGridIfRightColumn></tr></MTGridIfRightColumn>
</MTGridTrailingCells>
</MTGrid>
</table>
7. In this example, I illustrate one possibility for launching the image into a window with customizable HTML. You will want to download the HTML image viewer page that you can customize. View the source of this page and create a page on your server with it.
<MTPhotoGallery> <a href="showimage.html?src=<MTPhotoGalleryImageLink>"> </MTPhotoGallery>
8. Photojunkie Magazine wrote up an article on how to create a gallery with this plug-in.
Donate
This software is free for personal use. However, if you enjoy using this plugin and would like to see it enhanced, please donate a buck or two…or fifty.
Commercial use requires a $20.00 donation.
License
This software is licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL.
Download
Download the current version from the link below. Past versions are not archived.
- PhotoGallery.zip (Good for Windows)
- PhotoGallery.tar.gz (Good for Mac/UNIX)
Version History
1.1.1.0 — 2005-09-04
- Updated plugin info to take advantage of MT 3.2 enhancements.
1.1.0.2 — 2004-12-10
- Fixed bug where plugin reported error in MT-Medic.
1.1.0.1 — 2004-11-11
- Fixed defect where errors generated by other tags within MTPhotoGallery tag did not show errors correctly.
1.1.0.0 — 2004-08-19
- Added new count parameter that limits the number of photos listed. (Thanks to Pedro Figueiredo.)
- Changed the behavior of the random mode of the sort_order parameter so that it now lists all or count if specified. Previously, random only listed a single image.(Thanks to Pedro Figueiredo.)
1.0.1.1 — 2004-07-20
- Fixed bug that caused plug-in to hang when used in random mode with empty directories. (Thanks to Logan Ingalls.)
1.0.1.0 — 2004-06-24
- Added the silent parameter.
1.0.0.0 — 2004-05-29
- Made compatible with Movable Type 3.0.
0.58 — 2004-01-16
- Changed the path tag to only output the path and not the filename. I received lots of complaints about this. This breaks backwards compatiblity but its the right thing to do.
0.57 — 2004-01-09
- Fixed bug where random order was not using exclude pattern.
0.56 — 2004-01-02
- Changed URL link back to plugin.
0.55 — 2003-11-19
- Added the MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName tag.
0.50 — 2003-10-25
- Enhanced all of the tag arguments so that you can embed other Movable Type tags in them. Use the format such as arg=”[MTSomeTag]”.
0.43 — 2003-10-18
- I left in some debug stuff. I am an idiot. Removed.
0.42 — 2003-10-16
- Added date format of YYYYMMDD*.ext
0.41 — 2003-10-15
- Fixed bug where recent path changed caused broken images when you didn’t specify a path.
- Added uppercase versions of the supported image file extensions.
0.40 — 2003-10-13
- Changed the way that you specify paths. I received way too many emails from people that don’t know what their path is so I simplified it by making the path a relative value from your weblog’s configuration information.
- Added new container tags to test existance of optional fields.
- Added 2 new date formats.
0.31 — 2003-10-10
- Added parameter for specifying the extensions to show.
- Fixed bug with random display mode.
0.30 — 2003-09-09
- Added parameter to format the image date with normal Movable Type date formats.
- Added parameter to allow or prevent recursion of sub-directories.
- Added parameter to specify sort order of photos.
- Added ability to produce a random photo from the list.
- Added copyright information.
0.20 — 2003-08-27
- Added parameter to allow exclusions of files.
0.10 — 2003-08-14
- Works for me.
Contact
For questions, suggestions, bug reports, and anything else related to this plugin, please e-mail brandon@fuller.name or leave a comment.
Thank you, looking forward to using this. I can't help but wonder if this can be configured somehow with brad choate's plugin to provide a dynamic list of thumbnails...that would be a great mt photogallery to me, being an artist.
Hi, just thought I would add my thoughts. Just installed the plugin and it works a treat. I've just started converting all my Nokia 7650 snaps to go on my site.
If you are looking for suggestions it would be to link the photo to a template page instead of showing the full image in a plain browser window. Other than that, nice job.
Steve
You could do that pretty easily in your HTML in your template by just formatting a viewer type page and then passing in the image as an argument to the page for example.
would there be a way that you could have the thumbnail img link to the individual entry archive page that the larger img appears in?
Not without enhancing the plugin specifically for that purpose. There isn't a way to find the entry so the plugin would have to search all entries and find the ones where the picture was used and provide that entry as a possible URL. Not impossible but would take some work.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong just yet but I'm getting an error: Cannot open directory /www/www.fliptophead.com/blog/images/random: / at plugins/PhotoGallery.pl line 39.
That directory is a folder with lots of pics in it that i'm just using to test things out. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?
99% sure that you have the path wrong. Recheck it. Or better yet don't specify any path information and the plugin will just use your MT config. That should help figure out if its a path problem or not.
Another one for the wishlist:
It would be nice to make the filename format configurable in some way - my Digital Camera program uses the JPEG EXIF information to name the files, but I can only choose YYYY_MMDD or YYMMDD.
Would be nice if you could specify a dateformat= attribute, even if it was just a number of different fixed formats.
Excellent plugin as it is, though!
I have added the new date formats that you requested. Its easier for me for now to just add all the different formats. Eventually, it would be cool to make it configurable.
Great plugin. One addition to the wish list for the next version; would it be possible to add the date format YYYYMMDD*.EXT? Thanks.
Great Plugin. Is there a way for PhotoGallery to only display photos from a specified date?
2 options as of today. You could exclude those that have a certain pattern. Or you can put them in a specific directory. It doesn't have an "include only this pattern" option but may in the future.
nice script. i saw the comments and you said it can be achieved if i add the template so that i can change the jpg html background. can you post an example scripts on how to do it please? sorry about the fuss :( i am a beginner to this
Ok. See example #7.
Just playing with your script (and MT for that matter). Without any configuration, the photos seem to list in order of creation, most recent first. Which is good for my needs. Is there a way to create a parameter that would work like MT's "lastn=3" parameter. I would like to use your codes on the side bar showing the last 3 pics posted. Is that possible currently, and I'm missing something?
Very cool plugin..got it working finally after some stupidity of not realizing these are tags for the templates ;-) Anyway I want to create several categories and have a separate page for each category which uses the path= parameter to specify different directories. Only a single template the Category Template is used...I tried using the tag but that doesn't seem to restrict the images to the specific category directory...anyone got any clues?
For some reason the thumbnail images are not displaying, or being created for that matter. I'm using your example code from above #5. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong and you can give me some pointers. http://jumpgate.gotdns.com/blogs/images.html
You probably don't have the MTEmbedImage installed and working properly. Make sure you test that one out first.
hi brandon -
congratulations for this script and your beautyful dauther...
i`m pretty new in MT - just set it up 3 days ago. and may a little too stupid. build in your plugin, created a new index template on [http://blog.cssondemand.de], linked this template to [http://blog.cssondemand.de/fotos.html], copied some of your examples into the template, rebuild and nothing happend. May you can help?
99% of the time, people just don't understand Movable Type, its templates, or the plugins. I get tons of e-mails and its always something strange people are trying to do. Start with the simplest example and then build it up. Make sure you read the instructions.
and 1% are even too stupid to download a gz packed perl script. it`s working now - thanks
Hi Brandon
I really like this plugin! I just would like to know what template did you use in your page? Did you use the Grid plugin?
Thanks!
Yes, I used the grid plugin on my page.
How about the addition of a MTPhotoGalleryImageFile tag to return only the filename of the current file being iterated? Here's why: I use Photoshop to create my thumbnails (for a multitude of reason I'm not going to go into), and have a directory next to my images folder that contains all the thumbs. If I could use a preset path '/home/username/public_html/photoblog/archives/thumbs', and then use the MTPhotoGalleryImageFile to tack on the current filename (as they are named exactly the same) and the #1 example, my job is done. Also, then I don't have to install MTEmbedImage when just MTPhotoGallery would do.
Of course, I'm not sure if I'm the only one that does thumbnails by hand, but I like having control over how a thumbnail is created.
I added the tag, MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName, in so that you can get the file name.
Is it possible to show entry title instead of file name on the photo gallery ? If it is possible, how to do ?
Not currently. That would take a lot of work. There is no association between the picture and the blog entry it was in.
This is a great plugin, great work!
Is there a way your plugin can provide me with one or two random images from a specfic directory?
I have already figured out the directory stuff, along with the random sorting, I think, but how can i limit it to one or two image?
I believe someone asked about the 'lastn', I tried it with no luck. Do you have any ideas?
See example #3 above. It does exactly what you want.
Brandon, I was wondering if it is possible to use this plugin to display any photos (images) that have the same date as that of the entry?
regards, Matt
Brandon, great work!
Small bug report, I found that on 0.56 using sort_order="random" you may end up with a link to a file that was skipped. Changing line 104 from
push( @sortedfiles, $allfiles[rand @usefiles] );
to
push( @sortedfiles, $usefiles[rand @usefiles] );
should work.
Fixed in 0.57. Thanks!
I create both thumbnails and larger versions of my images. If I want to construct the page with thumbnails that link to the full version of the image, it seems like the only (plain HTML, non-javascipt) way is to use a "fixed path" for thumbnails as explained by Sean Sieg earlier.
However, if MTPhotoGalleryImagePath would present the "folder" Path (without the filename appended), then it would greatly expand the capability of PhotoGallery to create templates that can include both thumbnail and a link to the full image directly.
Of course, I'm not sure whether that would break the plugin's capability to work with MTEmbedImage or other plugins...
Done. I changed the tag to only output the path.
Great work on your plugin!!
I had to rollback to version 0.56 though because 0.58 seems to have broken my galleries... After installing 0.58, my thumbnails aren't getting generated. I saw a note in your version section that some sort of backward compatibility, could you explain this a little further so that I can get the current version working?
-Sonny
Yes, if you were using MTEmbedImage ala example 5, you need to change the tag to include the file name like:
basename="[MTPhotoGalleryImagePath]/[MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName]"
Thank you, worked like charm...
Is it possible to create a gallery for all folders in an images folder and also possibly generate a list of links for those galleries?
Also is it possible to group images under one common date?
The plugin can run recursively through all the folders. It presents them all together. It doesn't allow for any groupings or anything else special at a folder level. There is no grouping by date right now either.
Can I only show a random photo from the images folder?
Yes. (It says that in the documentation for the tag. I have been getting frustrated lately because lots of people have been posting comments about items that are listed above!)
I'm trying to set up my photos, but the relative file paths don't go high enough (i.e. it doesn't allow ../folder/ or /../folder/ or ../../folder)
Is there any way to make it a direct file path or allow the relative paths to go farther?
Everyone uses absolute paths that I know of with this plugin. Never tried relative paths. May or may not work...looks like not according to you. Sorry.
Never mind, the main problem was my own MT set-up. I didn't plug in the proper path for the archives, etc. and but now it should be working. Huzzah!
Thanks anyway. ;-)
Haha! Lea was here! Well, well, what a coincidence!
Anyhow, had a question of my own. When looking at Example #5 above I notice:
<MTEmbedImage basename="[MTPhotoGalleryImagePath]/[MTPhotoGalleryImageFileName]" width="150" thumbsuffix="-THUMB">
Is there a reason for the square brackets? Should they not be greater than and less than symbols? Were you doing this to show that you could use either of these two tags? Why is it that I cannot get this code to work anyhow!?
you replace that with the path to the images on your server
First off, just want to say thanks. This plugin has become very useful on my site.
Secondly I was wondering if there are any future plans to add something of a MTPhotoGalleryImageWidth or MTPhotoGalleryImageHeight tag. I'd like to be able to open the images up in an autosized popup window, and unfortunately can't do it correctly right now... Unless of course anyone has any ideas (I'd like to not use an extra plugins if possible, but I will if I have to.)
I have no plans right now for doing that but I understand your need. I would have to read in the image file with some image package and get the information. The Image::Magick package does this right now. I used MTEmbedImage which does some resizing for me. Not sure if you can use it just get the original height/width but you might check it out.
Hi,
I'm trying to use a path like ../images/ because I don't want to have my files in the mt folder, just like Lea does.
Any way to do that ?
Thanks for your great work :)
I use the relative path like ../path and it works fine.
Hi. The answer to the 2nd FAQ states 'Use the standard syntax of arg=”[MTTagName]” to do this'. My question: should it be possible to use, for example, arg=”[MTTagNameX]/[MTTagNameY]”? And just out of interest, is the use of square brackets around the tag name your own convention or something standard in MT plugins?
BTW ... thanks for the efforts.
Yep, that should work.
The square brackets is just something a bunch of different MT plugin authors started supporting to solve this type of problem. I adopted it b/c I needed the functionality myself. If you don't like it, there is another alternative, the TagInvoke plugin.
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/taginvoke.php
I feel pretty clueless. If I need to embed these tags in a template, then how do I set up separate groups of photos - do I create a new category and match each category to a template that covers just that directory/ies?
You create one template for each group that you want to do...or you can do as you said and map the groups to categories and use the category template and the same template with different paths or exclusions to show the right images.
This is really great, and your instructions are good too ... even I have mangaged to get it all working!!
Just one question though ... When the full size image opens up in the showimage.html file, is there any way of including that particular image title as per the thumbnails?
Sure. Just pass the title as an argument to the page and then parse it out.
Thanks Brandon. Sorry to say ... I dont know how to pass the title as an argument or how to parse it out. Any tips on where to look? You wouldnt have the code to hand that you could post, would you? Thanks again.
excellent plugin! thanks, brandon.
First off, a really great plugin! Thanks for sharing, Brandon!
But I'm having this problem with gallery. I'm using it for my category archives. I don't know why but MTPhotoGallery repeats itself according to the number of photos I have. See here: http://odds-and-ends.net/redesign/archives/landscape/index.html
Could you help me out? Thanks!
My guess is you either have duplicate photos or soft links that are recursing. Turn on the debug mode for the plugin (read above) and it will tell you where its getting them from.
I'm pretty sure there are only three photos (plus three thumbnails) in that folder. I have debug mode turned on and found that MTPhotoGallery processes the same 3 photos for 3 times (http://odds-and-ends.net/redesign/archives/landscape/index.html). Could it be that I have had the path specified the wrong way (path="photos/[MTArchiveTitle]")? Or could it have something to do with the MTEmbedImage plugin?
I'm trying to put my template into a .php page and have the path value for the MTPhotoGallery tag passed through the url as a GET string so I only need one template for multiple albums, referring to different source folders for the images in the URL. Unfortunately Movable Type won't allow 'path="album/$folder"' ($folder being passed through $_GET[]) and won't even compile the template.
So how do I make this work?
That will never work easily. The problem here is that Movable Type builds the pages when you hit the rebuild command. This is when the plugin kicks in and does its work. It would need access to the folder at that point. In the way you are doing it, you don't give the folder name until the page is actually fetched by a user which is long after the page has already been built. Hope that makes sense.
Hi,
I have installed you plugin. But I got the following error message when rebuilding my page.
"Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at plugins/PhotoGallery.pl line 240.". Any idea how to solve this?
Cheers,
Onno
I see this inside of Movable Type when one plugin is used inside of another. For example, if you use the MTEmbedImage plugin inside of MTPhotoGallery and MTEmbedImage throws the error, the next plugin will say this. I would simplfy your page and then build it up so you can see what the problem is. That or be sure the other plugins are working.
Sorry if I am being clueless here. I downloaded your plugin, checked that I have the necessary perl module and see that MT recognises the plugin.
Since I am pretty clueless about MT plugins, I started with the most simple one of your examples by replacing my index template and get the following error message:
Smarty error: [in mt:1 line 24]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'MTPhotoGallery' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 556)
Is there may be something I missed in my setup that I should have done?
Thanks
Jever98
The problem is that you are trying to use the plugin inside of dynamic (PHP) templates. It will not work. This plugin only works with the static (Perl) templates.
Thanks for the reply. Is there any other way of getting around this? I would like to have a couple of pics on my index page that are loaded randomly each time the page is built.
Cheers
Jever98
No, not directly. Change to use static templates and you can do that.
I'm trying to do the thumbnails, and I get the following error:
Can't locate bradchoate/embedimage.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ./extlib ./lib /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.1/i686-linux /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1/i686-linux /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl .) at plugins/embedimage.pl line 37.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks a lot!
You don't have the MTEmbededImage plugin installed. Read the instructions for that sample again. This is not part of MTPhotoGallery. You have to install it separately.
Hi Brandon. I'm having difficulty integrating MT Tags into the plugin. Essentially, what I'm planning to do is to have path="images/[MTEntryTitle]" and then have the image open up as MTPhotoGalleryImagePath.jpg
So, for example, if my current MTEntryTitle is Benches then the image to load would be /images/benches.jpg.
However, this does not seem to be working. At the moment, what gets churned up for the path of the image is http://websitename.com/.jpg so I'm not sure if I'm integrating the MT Tags correctly. Some help on this would be appreciated. Thanks.
The tags have to be in context...not sure if you have that going because I can't see your template. To use MTEntryTitle you have to be in between an MTEntries tag or you have to be on the individual archive template. Hope that helps. You would print out the value of MTEntryTitle as text (not in side of path) and see if it is working.
Hi Brandon. Thanks. I made some changes based on your advice. I've now set the MTPhotoGallery path="images" and then got the image to open up as img src="<MTPhotoGalleryImagePath>/<$MTEntryTitle$>.jpg". Then I put the whole MTPhotoGallery code within the MTEntries container and it now works. The image path is now looking right, which is http://websitename.com/images/Benches.jpg. :-)
How do u make the link to point the photo page instead of the photo itself????
ty
I am not sure what photo page you are talking about. You mean you have created a HTML page for each photo somehow?
i mean how can i link to the entry page (html) of the photo with its comments and formatting, not the photo in a blank page.
As of now, the plugin does not do that directly. However, you can do what is shown in example 4 above to allow the user a quick link to search for the post with the picture.
I have my image folder in another server than my MT server..
there is a way to usemy image server?
Dudu.exe, no this plugin does not support that. It uses the local file system. You can try out my MT-Enclosures plugin which you can configure to build photo galleries from all the images in your blog posts even if they are on other servers.
It's a good plugin for MT !!
but, I don't know how to Add photo's description in this (not "MTPhotoGalleryImageTitle" )
somebody knowns ?
Hi,
Thanks very much for your work on this plugin. It seems like something I'd like to use on my site, but I don't understand any of the directions.
Are there directions in more simplified English on how to use the plugin? I feel like everybody understands CSS, PHP and MySQL - except me!
Great plugin! I really like it, but could you add some "include only this pattern" command too?
Cause im trying to display only the thumbs and link them with your showimage.html but i cant seem to exclude every other image but the thumbs...
cool shit.
Thanks for the plugin!
Keep up the good work!
I'm wondering if this works with different size thumbnails. Each example I look at shows thumbs all the same size. My photos are not all the same size, and outputting them with set size distorts the images.
Great plugin!
How do i change the extension="" to include part of an image name i.e. image1-large.jpg, so the extension="-large.jpg"? Hoping to do "include just this image".
Thanks
The extension parameter won't do that. Read it carefully. If you reformat your image names to have a dot instead of a dash, you might be successful. I suggest you experiement with the exclude="" parameter.
It's awesome!
But I thinkg there's one thing missed.
I'd like you to add kinda "MTPhotoGalleryIfExist" tag which works like "MTEntryIfExtended" tag and ignores any tags and text between and if there's no thumbnails to display. I've tried to use silent=1 option but it wouldn't do what I want.
I'd like to display several thumbnails in index page only if the article have some images.
First of all thanks for this great plugin!
I get the same error with the latest version though. When I try to post an entry or when I rebuild, I get:
Build error in template 'Mainindex': Error in tag: Error in tag: Error in tag: Reading '/home/spyweb1/spy1u1171/html/test/test/bug.jpg' failed: Reading file '/home/spyweb1/spy1u1171/html/test/test/bug.jpg' failed: Exception 395: UnableToOpenConfigureFile `'
When I use a previous version (version 1.1.0.0 published on August 18, 2004), it all rebuilds, except for 1 image. I get this error instead:
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at plugins/PhotoGallery.pl line 358.
From n images, I always get n-1 in my gallery.
Thanks in advance for your advice regarding this issue!
ADDITION TO PREVIOUS POST:
CONCERNING version 1.1.0.0
What 's even more strange; when I add a new entry with a small gallery, the previous entry gets all its images! So it 's only the last gallery I added, which has n-1 images. The image that gets ignored is always the first in the list.
I 'm still using v.1.1.0.0 as I can't make the last version work (see error above).
Out of curiosity, do you happen to know of any sites I could take a look at this plugin in use on? I am curious on it's use and appearance. Thanks.
There are hundreds of sites but I haven't kept a list. I can add links on this page if people want to email me the link to your page with the plugin.
You can see mine at:
http://brandon.fuller.name/photos/2005/
thanks for this plug-in.
how do i use exclude attribute to include my thumbnails (t_filename.jpg) and exclude original pictures (blabla.jpg)
It took me some time, but now I figured out most of the plug-in. Thanks for developing it!
However there remains a question, I want to use my original photos for a sidebar showing the latest additions to my site, but I don't want the smaller images, which show up in the main blog, also showing up as thumbnail of the thumbnail.
In other words how can I use 2 terms in the exclude= tag?
I.e. I want to exclude both "-thumb" and "-128"
hi brandon,
seriously nice plugin. it has saved me so much time. my only question is about the formatting of other mt tags in the mtphotogallery tag. i want to do something like this:
"> but it throws an error, or i get ALL the image on my server. could you explain how to use this arg=[MTtag] in this context? how do the double quotes resolve? any help would be much appreciated.
thanks! nice work!
peter
It is a very good plugin. But I have to sell the computer. How can I uninstall the plug-in?
Great plugin, works for me 100% perfect for my needs... Thanks a lot!