Posted by Simon Goodchild  at May 13th, 2012

Release code name: Bon

Quite an exciting release this one, for a couple of reasons:

1. Priority has been set by Bronze member users via the voting page
2. The gallery plugin has been replaced to include photo comments (that has other other important connotations too, see below)

Replacement Gallery interface

So this is exciting! And I’m holding my breath as with any change, it may not be to everyone’s taste – but I’ll explain why the change has been made and hopefully you’ll understand.

Adds Comments - members can now comment on photos, this was the initial request

Gets rid of Colorbox - which will help sites use other image tools like thickbox without clashing, removes an external dependency and removes the need to load up external script and CSS for Colorbox.

See all photos in an album - so you can jump to particular photos.

Under my control - not a power thing, but opens up the potential for further improvement. For example, I’d personally like to be able to set the album cover photo and rename photo titles from within the new gallery interface (manage the album from one place).

Under your control – setting up the CSS for the jQuery dialog box can be easily controlled, check out this tutorial.

Supports left/right cursor keys, Return, Escape and click on photo - so hopefully intuitive.

Demonstrates the auto-extending text field - if elastic is set on the WPS settings page. If this is okay, it can be copied across to status field and comments on the activity page. :)

But there is a little downside, and I apologise…. On the activity feed, any mention of uploaded photos will not be supported, they are historical. There is a fallback (the image is shown), but not great. So bear in mind, only new activity items will support the new interface. Note that the gallery page, and “My gallery” on profile page are okay as they are dynamically generated.

Code appearing after activity status field

This has been fixed.

Misleading installation page (mis-information)

Activated WPS plugins don’t get listed now.

Member directory filter

This allows site admin’s to add profile information to each item in the member directory. It’s fairly simple to do – take a look at this tutorial.

Speed up member directory search

When searching for a member, you want to find them, that’s the main purpose. So I’ve simplified the query on the search results which should speed it up.

Text Domains

You can now put your .mo language files in one of three locations, as listed below. Note, if in lang or language, they may be removed when you update WP Symposium plugin. If you leave it in the plugins folder it should not be effected by upgrades. But these other two locations may be useful for other plugins, etc.

• wp-content/plugins
• wp-content/plugins/wp-symposium/lang
• wp-content/plugins/wp-symposium/language

WP Symposium all uses that same wp-symposium text domain now.

That’s it until next week’s release.

Please don’t be too harsh with the photo gallery, it will no doubt improve as we find what’s missing, and any bugs will be squashed quickly. If you do have problems, bear in mind it’s using jQuery UI now, not Colorbox. jQuery UI is becoming the safe and normal way to use jQuery dialog boxes (I predict WordPress will replace Thickbox with jQuery UI dialog boxes before too long!).

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