completed A few remaining issues in member images galleries

But before I say anything else I have to say thank you to Paul and team for working on this and making huge strides in functionality and usability in such a short period of time. I know that if I had gone to Ning with the same kinds of issues that it would be months, if ever, before anything were done.

With the updates to jrGallery yesterday, I have been able to create new galleries (on the image update form) and move images into them. By selecting "group by gallery" in quota config all of the imported images are in one gallery which has, by default, the member name - and new galleries appear above based on last updated (sort asc).

That said ...

1) One thing I have noticed on the image update form is that the phrase displayed below the image is not visible anywhere on the update form. If it's the image title then the title field in the update form is not being populated. I have been adding titles and am happy to note that both the description of the image and any comments are on the image page. I have replied to at least one of those comments so I am happy to report that that works as expected.

2) There is still the fact that Gallery in the menu ribbon and Images:### in stats go to the same place - so we still have two different words that mean the same thing. What I think the correct behavior to be is that the Images:### link should go to:

http://www.sitename.tld/membername/gallery/membername/all

2a) What's confusing here (and you can see it in the URL above and in the breadcrumb is that my membername appears twice and it's not clear why. The form of the URL that makes more sense (to me, anyway) is:

http://www.sitename.tld/membername/gallery/all

Note that the URL is tidy when looking at one of my new galleries:
http://www.sitename.tld/membername/gallery/faces-of-chocolate/all

3) Search within my gallery

The names of images contain clues on how they were organized on my Ning site. However, I can't search within my gallery. I can search within the collection of all images, but that's comparatively inefficient. So, having a search capability within my gallery - if only on the main gallery page - would be very helpful organizing the images into libraries.

These are some of the mechanics of the new gallery format that should be looked at but - at least for me - they are not deal breakers keeping me from going live. I told my members that there would be some rough edges.

And - I have to say after just trying it out for the first time - the gallery re-arrange image order function in Jamroom is so far superior to Ning's that they are not even in the same universe. I used to dread using the Album function in Ning and made sure that no album contained more than the number of images that could be displayed in the first page (either 16 or 20) as it was impractical to the point of impossibility to move images from one page to another.

:: Clay
updated by @claygordon: 02/14/15 12:23:07PM

Shouldn't both the stats link AND the menu simply point to:

http://www.sitename.tld/membername/gallery ?

Since that is the "index" page for the profile's images. It will either be the most recent grid of images (if Group By Gallery is OFF) OR a list of their galleries (if Group By Gallery is on) - that is the most consistent and "logical" way to handle it in my opinion.

Is that not correct?

Thanks!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Brian -

IMO that's not correct.

Whats' going on here, I think, is that you're thinking that "group by gallery" is a global property and it shouldn't be. The behavior should be consistent with clicking on the images link in the top tab. Images are not displayed by galleries there.

On my Profile page I now have two buttons with different names that perform the same action. That's confusing to me. Why do I need two buttons that do the same thing - when each has a different name.

When I click on Gallery (I may rename in the language file to Galleries) I want to see the groupings - in Ning-speak Albums - of images.

When I click on Images I want to see all of my images - no gallery associations. When I click on an image to view it larger it will be displayed in the context of the gallery it belongs to.

All images belong to a gallery. I imported mine so that, by default, each member's images belong to a gallery that is named their member name.

I have group by gallery set to on. I like that default display. However, I do want to be able to see all of the images without having to select a gallery to view all.

I agree with what Clay is saying here, fwiw.

and YES, huge improvements have been made lately that are wonderful!


--
...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

This is only on the NingJa skin though - other skins display galleries.


This is why I mentioned earlier that IF you have set the "Group by Gallery" OFF, then it makes sense to change the Menu item for Galleries to "images" instead of "gallery". This can be done in the Language Tab.

Alternately you could also change the "images" in the "stats" section to say "gallery". Then the text is the same.

What I'm trying to prevent doing is changing how the gallery works by default JUST for the NingJa skin. Does that make sense?

Since we have full control over the text, then it might make sense to just be sure the text lines up so there is no confusion...


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

I will take a look at this and get back to you. I understand not wanting to have different meanings across different skins.

@brian -

One change I want to try on my site, just to see if it solves my issues. I am still testing the UX of the images gallery.

What I would like to do is modify the destination URL for the Images:XXX label in Stats. Right now it's going to the same place as Gallery. I want to change it to :

path/membername/gallery/membername/all

I don't want you to change it, I just want to know where to change it and how - so I can change it back if I don't like it.

TIA.

I believe that is the "stats" section in the profile_footer.tpl file in the jrNingja skin.

Hope this helps!


--
Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Brian:

If so I don't see it.

There's a call to footer.tpl inside /skins/activeskinname/footer_profile.tpl and there is no stats section within the skin's footer.tpl file.

Going to the user profiles module there is no footer.tpl.
updated by @claygordon: 01/12/15 08:53:22PM

I was away from my desk all day ... any thoughts?

The stats is in profile_header.tpl and looks like this:

The capture section is the layout for each row. What it does is create a loop over each of the stats and link them to their url on the profile.

What you'll need to do to change the url is check for the one your interested in and create an IF/ELSE section.

eg:

updated by @michael: 01/12/15 09:33:27PM

Why do I want to do an if/else if I want to do is just permanently change the existing URL?

You'll find the stats are in the skins/jrNingja/profile_sidebar.tpl


--

Douglas Hackney
Jamroom Team - Designer/Developer/Support
FAQ-Docs-Help Videos

The if/else is looking for the image stats, unless you want to change the URL for all stats to the same, it is needed.

Hope this helps!


--

Douglas Hackney
Jamroom Team - Designer/Developer/Support
FAQ-Docs-Help Videos

Because you only want to change the url for the jrGallery module right?

Yes. I only want to change the URL for the Images:### .

I don't want it to go to the same place as Gallery in the menu above but to show all images for that member.
updated by @claygordon: 01/13/15 07:34:15PM

That bit of code:
Is just saying "If this is the gallery module, then use this different url". Which is exactly what you want to do.

So tell it the URL to use on the next line:

See that part that reads /wherever/you/want/to/go/in/here. Edit that part to point to where you want it to go.

what happened to the onclick="window.location=' .... ?

The good thing is that I added the code and the page did not blow up. However, without the onclick handler the buttons don't do anything when you click them.
updated by @claygordon: 01/14/15 10:49:57AM

The Great Good News! is that I was able to get the functionality to work the way I want it to. My challenge was that a link on the page with the name Images appeared on the page in two different places and had very different outcomes. Furthermore, two links with different names had the same outcome.

What I was looking to do was to display a Gallery View when the visitor to the page clicks on Gallery in the menu ribbon across the top of the profile. The URL for this is:

domainname.tld/membername/gallery

However, when the visitor to the page clicks on the Images button in the Stats section I wanted to display all of the images irrespective of any gallery associations (which is the way Images works in the top nav except it shows all images without member associations and grouping.

Here's the working code. It starts at line 89 in profile_sidebar.tpl and I have copied the entire {if isset ...} block even though I have only changed what's inside the {literal}. There was only one problem I had working from Michael's example, which is that he used an href when the onclick handler was needed. I quickly realized the problem and made the fix.


IMO, the URL on this is unnecessarily complicated and needs to be simplified.

The final path in the above is:

The question I have is why the extra {$profile_url}?

If the actual final path was:

This would do two things:

First is that it would eliminate the second membername from the path (and in the breadcrumb trail) which is totally confusing to me why it's even there - and if it's confusing to me it's going to be confusing to my members.

Second, from a coding perspective, is that it simplifies the code to:

Which has a LOT of advantages when it comes to maintenance across future upgrades.
updated by @claygordon: 01/14/15 11:39:15AM

Yes, its not needed, but is there for SEO purposes, to help search engine spiders/crawlers catalogue the page.
You also see it on item detail pages where the last part of the URL is the item title.
hth


--
Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

I suppose the way to futureproof this would be to replace the explicit call to /gallery/ with /{$murl}/ then.

Doesn't solve the confusing breadcrumb issue.

That aside - thanks to all for being patient with me on this one.
updated by @claygordon: 01/14/15 11:48:29AM

No Fair! You can't add confusing code then complain that the code is confusing.

this:
Isn't in any code that we have released. Where'd you get it from?

--edit--
I can see what your wanting to do. I'll check it out.
updated by @michael: 01/14/15 08:45:18PM

It's not me - honest.

On my profile page, ( http://www.thechocolatelife.info/thechocolatelife/chocliferoot ) I click on Galleries and the destination URL is:

http://www.thechocolatelife.info/thechocolatelife/chocliferoot/gallery

However, I want to look at just the images without any gallery associations. The URL that works is:

http://www.thechocolatelife.info/thechocolatelife/chocliferoot/gallery/chocliferoot/all

The following URL (which would be the preferred form, IMO) fails (404):

http://www.thechocolatelife.info/thechocolatelife/chocliferoot/gallery/all

I am just coding what the system behavior tells me works, and that is {$profile_url}/gallery/{$profile_url}/all
updated by @claygordon: 01/14/15 08:45:31PM

too fast. I can see what your wanting to do. I'll check it out. Hold on.

On a side note for the scanner ... this URL fails to be identified as a URL:

( http://www.thechocolatelife.info/thechocolatelife/chocliferoot)

This works:

( http://www.thechocolatelife.info/thechocolatelife/chocliferoot )

I remember a thread of Strumelia's where some smiley's were not being properly identified ...

Try the new version 1.4.2.

The url is:
https://YOUR-SITE.com/(profile)/gallery/all

There is a link to it from the bottom of the galleries list on the profile.

Simplified the code to:


and it works as expected.

Thanks.