v1.6.1 - April 29, 2008
Media Gallery has added several new key features in v1.6, below is a quick list of new or enhanced features in this release:
Release 1.6.0 of Media Gallery will remove support for Geeklog.
The media rating system has been completely reworked in Media Gallery 1.6.0. It now supports a visual star based rating and uses AJAX (if JavaScript is enabled) to rate the media without having to refresh the page. If JavaScript is disabled, then the rating will require a page refresh.
All rating information is now stored in the database to facilitate some additional reporting and to prevent users from rating an item multiple times.
There are new restrictions on how the rating works:
When you Reset Ratings using the Media Edit Screen, the rating history is also deleted so users will be able to rate that item again in the future.
Media Gallery has been modified to use the standard .plugin styles that are included with glFusion v1.0+. Past versions of Media Gallery included a separate style sheet. Now, Media Gallery should better fit the current style (theme) of a site since it will use the same style sheet the rest of the glFusion site uses.
If you have customized the Media Gallery style sheet in the past, you will need to apply your styles to the standard glFusion style sheet.
I'm open to feedback on this change. If you have an opinion to share, please do.
In prior versions of Media Gallery, you would create a 'podcast' album by selecting the Podcast attribute in the album editor. This functionality has changed. Now, selecting the podcast attribute simply changes how the RSS feed is generated. It does not affect the album's look and feel. To emulate the old functionality, we will use the per album themes to select the Podcast album theme.
In previous versions of Media Gallery, there was a small slideout MP3 player displayed below the thumbnail for MP3 files in a podcast album. To enable this slideout player in Media Gallery v1.6, you have a new Album Configuration Attribute called MP3 Ribbon Player. Enable this attribute and the slideout player will display below the thumbnail in the album view.
In prior versions of Media Gallery, all uploaded image media was converted to JPG format. Media Gallery now no longer performs this conversion, instead it keeps the image media in its native format, at least for JPG, PNG, GIF and BMP image types.
Media Gallery now supports an internal search feature that will return the search results in a standard album view format. You can configure how the album view will look by modifying the new configuration options located in System Options → Display Options
| Configuration Option | Values |
|---|---|
| Search Columns | The number of columns to display in the search results. |
| Search Rows | The number of rows to display in the search results. |
| Search Results Audio/Video Playback Type | Choose the playback type for audio and video media items. Possible selections are: - Play in Popup Window - Download to local computer - Play inline - Use mms: links for Microsoft media only |
| Show Views Counter in Search Results | Whether or not to display the media views counter in the search results. |
| Show Rating in Search Results | Whether or not to display the rating values in the search results. |
Media Gallery will also use the Index Skin for the search results. You may ask why we didn't create a specific configuration entry for Search Results. Since the Media Gallery Index Skin only uses the gallery_* templates and no others, we decided to simplify the code a bit and share the same value. Since the Search Results will use the album_* templates, you can easily share this setting without conflict.
Media Gallery has supported keywords for each media item for some time, but there really has not been much functionality with them. New to Media Gallery v1.6.0 is that the keywords are now hot links that will display all media items with that same keyword when selected. This leverages Media Gallery's enhanced internal search feature.
MP3 media is now always played using the Flash MP3 player.
For albums that contain several MP3 media files, there is a new Slide Show option called MP3 Jukebox. This will display a screen with a Flash based media player that will play all MP3 files in the album.
There is a new autotag, playall, this will embed a small Flash based MP3 jukebox in your story or static page.
New in v1.6.0 is the ability to now select which FLV player you wish to use. The default MGflv player developed by Wayne Patterson offers a great user interface and feature set. The FlowPlayer FLV player offers the ability to customize the skin which can give you a little more flexibility with integrating it into your site.
To select which player to use, there is a new configuration option in System Options → Display Options
Flash Video Player
You can select to use MGflv or FlowPlayer as the default Flash Video Player.
All the FLV playback templates have been consolidated down to 2 base templates:
You can now customize these 2 templates and it will be reflected in all FLV playback areas. This includes inline, pop-up, local FLV and streaming FLV.
FlowPlayer Customization
Media Gallery supports using FlowPlayer as the default FLV player. One of the features of FlowPlayer is the ability for you to customize its look and feel. Starting with FlowPlayer v1.19, you can now 'skin' the player.
The FlowPlayer author has released a separate tool for skinning. It is called the FlowPlayer Skinning Kit and is available at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=133868&package_id=146998&release_id=524349
The kit is designed to run out of the box on a Windows workstation. It requires that you have the Sun Java runtime installed and also Apache's ANT system installed. You can download Sun's latest Java runtime. You can get a copy of Apache's ANT system here: http://code.google.com/p/winant/
The kit runs from the command line. Go to the directory where you unpacked the distribution package and run ant. The generated player is placed in build/FlowPlayer.swf. By default it generates the default player with the gray skin.
To create your own skin, replace the image files in the images directory. The names of the files are fairly self explanatory and there is some supporting comments in the included xml/Skin.xml.tmpl file.
To use it on Linux or Mac you need to replace the included swfmill binary with the version built for your operating system. Swfmill is availabe for download on their site.
Please refer to the README file included in the package for more info.
Media Gallery now supports 3 main templates to control the look / feel of the media view. If the media type is video, the view_video.thtml template is used. For audio, the view_audio.thtml template. All other media types use the view_image.thtml template.
This will allow you to have a custom look / feel for video or audio files. For example, if you have an album that only holds video files, you can change the color scheme or other attributes for videos simply by editing private/plugins/mediagallery/templates/view_video.thtml. The changes will only affect videos, no other media type. Thanks to Richard Towler for this idea.
Media Gallery now supports an option that will allow you to move the templates into your theme layout directories. This means that you can now have a separate look / feel for Media Gallery for each theme you have installed on your site.
If you want to move the templates to your theme directories, there are 4 steps you must follow:
$_MG_CONF['template_path'] = $_CONF['path'] . 'plugins/mediagallery/templates';
$_MG_CONF['template_path'] = $_CONF['path_layout'] . 'mediagallery/';
Remember you will need to copy the files above to all of your theme directories. Now you can have a custom Media Gallery style.css for each theme. You can even customize the images used in Media Gallery per theme. For example, the little envelope icon used for Media Gallery post cards can be changed for each theme.
I have enhanced the filecheck utility in Media Gallery to now verify every file included in the Media Gallery distribution. It also reports if any unknown directories or files exist within Media Gallery directory structure.
The main reason for this feature is to allow you to clean up old Media Gallery files. As Media Gallery has grown, some files have been renamed, moved, or simply deleted. FileCheck will help you with the housekeeping.
Also, it provides a method to detect if something or someone has installed files in the Media Gallery directory tree. A very simple security check.
I have added support for album themes. This means you can select a different style sheet and templates for each album. Currently in the development release there is only the default theme, but I will develop a couple of others before final release.
Update on Album Themes
If you wish to create a custom set of templates for a 'theme', you only need to copy over the templates you are going to change, you do not need to copy every template over to the new skin/ directory.
This feature can also be used to make local modifications to the Media Gallery template files and not worry about them being overwritten during an upgrade.
These are just the major feature improvements, there have been several other minor enhancements and additions as well. See the full ChangeLog file in the distribution for more details.