Update: PhotoQ 1.6.5 – Makes Your Photoblog More Future-proof
This post describes PhotoQ 1.6.5, an update for PhotoQ 1.6. For a full description of PhotoQ please see the main post.
What if you decide one day to add a watermark to all your published photos? What if your site design changes and you have to resize all your published photos? If your blog only contains a handful of photos, no big deal. But what if you were really creative and published hundreds or even thousands of photos? In this case, having a future-proof solution is vital as adapting things by hand is no longer an option. PhotoQ was designed with these aspects in mind: whenever you change an option (e.g., the size of thumbnails) this change is applied to both, photos that have already been published, and photos that are to be published in the future. Even though PhotoQ had this feature from start, it could run into problems on websites with a lot of published photos. The time and resource consuming process of rebuilding the photos would often terminate because of PHP script timeouts. In PhotoQ 1.6.5 this whole process has been redesigned. Time consuming rebuilding tasks are now split over several Ajax calls preventing timeouts and making rebuilding of large websites safer. Further, the process is now more transparent, the user now stays informed thanks to a progress bar indicating the completion status of the rebuilding process.
In addition to the above, PhotoQ 1.6.5 also contains a few bug fixes and some refactoring. The update is therefore recommended to everybody running PhotoQ. For iQ2 users there is also a companion update to iQ2 1.0.6.
New features:
- Time consuming tasks are now split over several Ajax requests.
- “Rebuild all” button allows for complete rebuild of website with one click.
Bugs fixed:
- Wrong escaping during batch uploads. Thanks to Dave Wilson for pointing this out.
- Image sizes are now only rebuilt if they really changed.
- Not selecting a watermark in watermark upload process no longer creates errors all over the place.
Other changes:
- “Upgrading” section in PhotoQ settings has been renamed to “Maintenance”.
- Started migration of error handling to PEAR_ErrorStack.
I would also like to remind you again that there is now a forum at http://www.whoismanu.com/forum/. Please use it for all bug reports and support questions from here on. Thanks.
Bummed Out Bigtime thinks:
Suggestion: Why don’t you warn people in the installation instructions that PhotoQ requires safe_mode to be turned off. Right or wrong, most servers refuse to do that for security reasons.
I love the iQ2 theme and was excited about the many features of PhotoQ. But I just invested (wasted?) 2+ hours, only to run into that brick wall.
I see from the forum there is no workaround… geez, what a waste of people’s time.
whoismanu says:
Bummed Out Bigtime,
it is clearly stated in the plugin requirements of the plugin documentation: http://www.whoismanu.com/photoq-wordpress-photoblog-plugin/#requirements
what else can i do?
Bob Horn says:
Hi,
I would like to try your PhotoQ app out, but before I do, I need to ask you a question. I saw a mention of the fact that ‘safe_mode’ needs to be turned off. Where and how can I find that setting to see if it is off or on? I use Yahoo to host my blog, and I just don’t know where to look for the status of that setting. I appreciate any assistance you can provide. Thanks very much,
Bob
Gonesouth thinks:
My wife has been using a traditional blogging product called MyBloggie to run her travel blog, which is organized in posts covering a day’s travel and about 40 pictures. The posts consist of a vertical column of pictures, separated normally by one or two lines of words describing what was happening, where we were, or making a comment about the picture. We would like to shift from the privately hosted existing host to a commercial host which wants us to use WordPress.
Would PhotoQ be a good product for this? I am thinking that placing the words in a tag during the queueing process or before uploading would take the place of the current ‘writing’ process, and the rest of the writing process could become automated, but we feel it is important that users not have to click and wait to see the next picture when the pictures are treated as separate posts.
In detail my questions really boil down to:
1. Can PhotoQ produce posts with multiple large pictures or is it restricted to a single picture per displayed page?
2. Is there a limit on the length of a tag used to describe each picture or can they contain a paragraph or more of text?
Thanks
Jim
whoismanu says:
bob horn,
your support question has been moved to the forum at http://www.whoismanu.com/forum/topic/determine-whether-safe_mode-on-or-off and it will be answered there because i try to have everything handled at one location only. thanks for posting future support questions directly on the forum.
whoismanu says:
jim,
1. no unfortunately not. photoq is restricted to a single photo per post. now this does not mean “single photo per page” as you can show several posts on the same page (which is e.g. what the default wordpress theme does).
2. i would put the description into the photoq description field rather than a tag. this field can hold quite a bit of text. ok, everything has a limit but i guess this one can hold some ten thousand characters :-)