= NextGEN Enhancer Wordpress Plugin This is a Wordpress plugin, that enhances the functionality of NextGEN Gallery [1], a great photo gallery plugin for Wordpress. THIS PLUGIN DOES NOT AND WILL NOT WORK WITH NEXTGEN >= 2.0 ! And another warning up front: THIS PLUGIN IS NOT FOR EVERYBODY. It makes certain assumptions about how your content is organised, and it makes changes to your NextGEN Gallery database, although it is configurable in many ways, and is relatively safe to use. It was developed on a 'works for me' basis, initially to get rid of a growing collection of patches on NextGEN Gallery, that made upgrading a drag, over and over again. This is now over :-) == Features This plugin has the following features: * Retaining meta-data. If you use NextGEN Gallery with GD for image manipulation, image meta-data (EXIF) is lost after -for example- resizing. NextGEN Enhancer uses a perl program named `exiftool' to save the meta-data to a file (XMP format), and restore the data in the image file after manipulation. The XMP file can optionally be kept for future reference. * Automatic management of image descriptions. NextGEN Gallery provides a 'description' field for each image, in which you can manually describe your image. NextGEN Enhancer introduces a way to automatically manage the description field from various sources of information. For this purpose, it creates its own database table, in which the actual caption of image, as well as other information like copyrights are stored. Using a template, the description of the image can be assembled from this information and from an image's meta-data. Automatic management of the description field can be switched on or off for each image separately. * Video support. NextGEN Enhancer can automatically detect video files by matching the filename against a regular expression. For video files, it can import some properties (only width/height and mtime for now) from a separate XML file, and store those in the database. When viewing a gallery, video files can be viewed with your favorite flash player like JW Player or Flowplayer. If you have one of these players installed through a WP plugin, configuration of this feature is really easy. * Page pre- and suffixes. NextGEN Enhancer lets you create a WP page for showing a gallery. NextGEN Enhancer lets you specify a prefix and a suffix, that will be automatically added to the gallery page. This works nicely, for example when protecting your pages with Hidepost [2]. * (Experimental) Tzzbox overlay effect. NextGEN Enhancer comes with its own Lightbox alternative. When enabled, the JavaScript Thumbnail effect setting of NextGEN Gallery is overridden. In v1.1 the custom Tzzbox effect was replaced by a fork of Shutter Reloaded [8]. * (Experimental) A shortcode [nggenav] for quick navigation between album pages. === Retaining meta-data To turn this option on, check the option 'Retain EXIF data with exiftool' on the options page. You will have to specify the path to `exiftool', too. The default path is /usr/bin/exiftool, which is suitable for Debian/Ubuntu if you have libimage-exiftool-perl installed. IMPORTANT NOTE: this currently only works for importing new images. For image operations like resizing, the meta-data is NOT written back to the image, due to a bug in NextGEN Gallery. See [6] for more information. === Automatic management of image descriptions This is the most complex feature of NextGEN Enhancer and it is turned off by default. To make use of this feature, you should take the following steps: 1. Check and set the default copyright message on the options page. This will be set on every image that is put under NextGEN Enhancer's control. Its use is optional, but more on that under 4. It is in strftime() format, so you can use placeholders that will be replaced by date/time information. 2. Decide if you want to use this feature globally, for every image in every gallery. If you do, proceed with 3, otherwise, go to 7. 3. Check the option named 'Automatically manage NextGEN's description field' on the options page. 4. The options page provides two templates, one for images and one for videos. Check if the template for images is to your liking. For example, if you don't care about copyrights, remove it from the template. 5. (Optional) Prime NextGEN Enhancer's database table with the button at the bottom of the options page. This will create a record for every image in every one of your galleries, set the copyright to what you specified before and copy the 'description' field from NextGEN Gallery's database to the 'caption' field of NextGEN Enhancer. No changes are made to your NextGEN Gallery database. 6. Globally update the descriptions of all images in your dabase. This WILL make changes in your NextGEN Gallery database; that's why this is a separate step. You can do this by clicking the 'Globally update descriptions' button on the options page. A means of doing this on a per-gallery basis is provided under 8. 7. (Optional) When managing a gallery, there is a new checkbox in the rightmost column named 'NextGEN Enhancer enabled'. If this is checked, it means a record for that particular image is present in NextGEN Enhancer's table, and automatic description management is available for that image. Using the checkbox in the table header, you can (de)select all images at once. Save your changes to add or remove images from NextGEN Enhancer's care. 8. If you have automatic management enabled globally, NextGEN Enhancer will update the description field of the image every time you save your changes. If you chose to leave this feature disabled, you can select images by checking their checkbox, and under 'Bulk actions', choose 'Update description with NextGEN Enhancer'. === Video support This feature is the one that has the most prerequisites before it might become of use to you. To turn this option on, check the 'Video support' checkbox on the options page. It is turned off by default. With this feature, NextGEN Enhancer will check the filename of each new image that is imported into NextGEN Gallery against a regular expression that you can provide. If the filename matches, the file is considered to be the preview image of a video file. This means a couple of things: * In the 'extended' album view, the number of images and videos is reported separately, instead of just one number of items. WARNING: this currently only works when your language is English, or any other language where the album view displays the word 'Photos' with the number for each gallery. * For each matching file, the link for the thumbnail when viewing a gallery will point at the .swf of a flash video player, that you can set using the 'HTML reference to Flash video player' option. This has been tested with JW Player [3] and Flowplayer [4], but only using Lightview [5] or the 'Tzzbox' overlay effect that comes with this plugin to view the gallery, so this may or may not work for you at all. * For matching files, an XML file is read for video meta-data. At this point, only width and height are imported. This information can be used to instruct your Lightview/Lightbox/Shadowbox viewer which size to open the video. The following has to be taken into account: * Only tested with Lightview and Tzzbox. Other lightbox clones almost guaranteed not to work. * Your filenames have to follow a certain convention: - say, the preview image is named 'myvideo.mp4.jpg' - the actual video should then be named 'myvideo.mp4' and be located in the same directory - the meta-data XML should be named 'myvideo.mp4.xml'. * The format of the XML file is fixed for now. This should change in the future. * For both Lightview and Tzzbox, the description template for videos (see options page) should contain the tag {lightviewoptions} at the end. This tag will make sure that the description is formatted, so that Lightview/Tzzbox knows the dimensions of the video. The XML format is as follows: {HEIGHT} {WIDTH} {MTIME} === Tzzbox overlay effect (experimental) NextGEN Enhancer comes with 'Tzzbox', a Lightbox-like effect, forked from Shutter Reloaded [8]. The only difference with Shutter Reloaded at this point, is video support using JW Player. === Album navigation shortcode (experimental) A shortcode [nggenav] allows you to quickly set up a navigation bar for album pages. If you, like me, have many album pages with similar names, for example 'Photos 2012', 'Photos 2011', 'Photo specials', etc. it may be convenient to automatically have links to all other albums on every album page. This shortcode fetches all pages that have a meta-key named 'ngg_album' and creates a series of links out of them. A regular expression search-and-replace is done on the page titles, so you can strip off certain words. For example, if your pages are named like mine, you could strip off the word 'Photos' and just keep the year. At the moment, the search-and-replace patterns, as well as the link separator ( | ) can only be changed in the code, but they will be turned into settings soon. The meta-key 'ngg_album' has to be added to the appropriate pages by hand via the 'Edit page' screen, in the 'Custom Fields' section. If this section is not visible, you can enable it via 'Screen Options', in the top-right corner of the screen. The value of the key does not matter. The links are sorted by page title in descending order by default, but you can influence this by changing the 'Order' attribute of the page. You can set a negative order to move a link to the start of the list. == To do * Make video support in album view work in other languages than English * Make the format of the video metadata XML configurable * Support other Lightbox clones than Lightview for videos * Support NextGEN Gallery's ImageBrowser for videos * See how video support works in a default NextGEN Gallery installation * Support HTML5 video in addition to Flash * Improve documentation == Links [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/ [2] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hidepost/ [3] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jw-player-plugin-for-wordpress/ [4] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/ [5] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightview-plus/ [6] http://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery/issues/detail?id=451 [7] http://flowplayer.org/tools/ [8] http://www.laptoptips.ca/javascripts/shutter-reloaded/