Shashin 2.2 – Slideshows and Built-In Video Display

On August 23, 2008 by Mike With 56 Comments - WordPress

Shashin was overdue for an upgrade. The new version incorporates the latest version of Highslide, which means the big new feature is slideshows (scroll to the bottom of my Post to Post Links II error: No post found with slug "shinjuku-gyoen-national-garden" post to see a slideshow in action). I made the addition of the slideshow buttons automatic, which means if you’re already a Shashin user, you don’t need to do anything to enable slideshows in posts you’ve already written.

The other major new feature is that Shashin can now play Picasa videos locally in a Highslide window. This is also automatic. If you already have video thumbnails in your posts, and you’ve selected Highslide for viewing full size images in the Shashin Settings menu, then the videos will now play locally in a Highslide window. Here’s an Post to Post Links II error: No post found with slug "eidan-rocks-out".

A word of caution if you put a video within a slideshow of other images: the video will load up and start playing, but if the length of the video exceeds the length of time that’s set for displaying each image, the video will stop and the next image will be loaded. There’s no way around that.

Other new features include:

  • New options in the Settings menu for autoplaying Highslide slideshows, how long to display each slideshow image, and the dimensions for displaying videos.
  • Checks for shashin.css and highslide.css in your active theme directory – this allows you to customize the stylesheets without worrying about losing your customizations the next time you upgrade Shashin.
  • No longer necessary to update image paths in highslide.css if you have WordPress installed in a subdirectory on your site (unless you choose to put a custom version of highslide.css in your theme directory – then you need to update the image paths to point to their location in the plugins directory).
  • For the caption in Shashin’s tags, in addition to “y” or “n” you can now use “c”, which means all pictures will get the caption “Click picture to enlarge” and all videos will get the caption “Click picture to play video.” The actual caption will be displayed in the Highslide window.
  • Option to make thumbnails not clickable, if you don’t want to display a larger version.

You can download Shashin 2.2 at wordpress.org.

Important note to upgraders: Deactivate your old installation, upload the new version, and then reactivate. This is necessary for required updates to the Shashin tables. Also, you need to sync all your albums – click the “Sync All” button (under the “Manage” tab).

56 Comments

  1. anung August 24, 2008

    WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘enclosure_type’ in ‘field list’]
    UPDATE wp_shashin_photo SET photo_id = ‘5204588986010422242’, album_id = ‘5204588328880425937’, title = ‘DSC_0387.JPG’, description = ”, link_url = ‘http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/AyEgKdSw-w8fIlYwsM7oFQ’, content_url = ‘http://lh5.ggpht.com/himakom.ugm/SDpqG5EPy-I/AAAAAAAAAag/IOiDuKzG4Yw/DSC_0387.JPG’, width = ‘1024’, height = ‘681’, taken_timestamp = ‘1211706938000’, uploaded_timestamp = ‘1211706938000’, tags = ”, enclosure_url = ‘http://lh5.ggpht.com/himakom.ugm/SDpqG5EPy-I/AAAAAAAAAag/IOiDuKzG4Yw/DSC_0387.JPG’, enclosure_type = ‘image/jpeg’, deleted = ‘N’ WHERE photo_id = ‘5204588986010422242’

  2. Mike August 24, 2008

    Sorry about that! I inadvertently removed a line from the code that updates the shashin database tables. I just uploaded a fixed version to wordpress.org – version 2.2.1.

  3. anung August 24, 2008

    wow, fast reply 😀

    thanks, i loooove your plugin

  4. John August 24, 2008

    Hi Mike,

    great plugin, I was just thinking about tackling the upgrade of highslide myself and see you have already done it!

    I have installed plugin, but for some reason it has dropped the highslide navigation buttons, and the slideshow will not work.

    Also, how do you alter such options as how to centre the slide and darken the background? etc

  5. John August 24, 2008

    I keep getting this error:
    hs.addSlideshow is not a function

    addHSSlideshow(“group2”)

    Not sure if its another plugin conflicting

  6. John August 24, 2008

    bizarre, I started deactivating plugins and testing each one, after deactivating XML Google maps and myweather plugins it then (highslide) started working properly. Still working after reactivating plugins

  7. Mike August 24, 2008

    Hi John – I found a small bug that might be related. There was an extra slash in the URLs for shashin.css and highslide.css. I’m uploading a corrected version now.

    shashin/display/shashin.css controls the appearance of the thumbnails, and shashin/display/highslide.css controls the appearance of the slideshow. The Highslide CSS is documented here.

  8. Martha August 24, 2008

    I updated via the link in the dashboard but I forgot to deactivate the plugin first. I don’t know if that really matters, but; since the update the photos don’t show anymore and when I click sync or when I try to add an album, I get this warning: Album metadata synced, but failed to sync photos. This was probably a bad connection trying to read the RSS feed. Please try again.
    Same result every time. I don’t think it is due to a bad connection… picasa works fine.

  9. Martha August 24, 2008

    Allright, so it matters… but what to do in order to fix it?

  10. Mike August 24, 2008

    Hi Martha,

    Sorry for the trouble. I don’t think it should cause any permanent harm if you didn’t deactivate/reactivate right away, as long as you do it at some point. It wasn’t clear from your previous message, so I want to make sure – have you deactivated/reactivated since installing the new code? If you have, but you’re still having trouble, let me know, and I’ll help you debug it.

  11. anung August 24, 2008

    ok, installed and working perfectly

  12. John August 25, 2008

    great stuff Mike, I did see that // when I was looking at the Firebug html code and thought it might be an error

    I have now got Shashin doing what I want. For others who want to customise it a little bit more, this is what I did to get it working like Lightbox2 (where background dims on opening photo)
    1) you need to edit the php file, shashin.php (can be found under plugins
    2) Find this bit of code:

    hs.graphicsDir = ” . SHASHIN_DISPLAY_URL . ‘highslide/graphics/’;
    hs.align = ‘center’;
    hs.transitions = [‘expand’, ‘crossfade’];
    hs.outlineType = ’rounded-white’;
    hs.fadeInOut = true;

    Then add the following to the above:
    hs.dimmingOpacity = 0.75;
    hs.dimmingDuration = 100;

    3) Now I wondered why it wasn’t working, but then had to add the following to the highslide.css

    .highslide-dimming {
    background:black;
    }

    hope that helps someone else.
    Cheers
    John

  13. Martha August 25, 2008

    Oh, yes. I forgot to mention. I did deactivate-reactivate since. I also tried downloading by hand to see if it made a difference, but it didn’t.

  14. Mike August 25, 2008

    Hi Martha – please check line 220 of Shashin.php. It should be this:

    if ($foundEnclosure === false) {
    $wpdb->query('ALTER TABLE ' . SHASHIN_PHOTO_TABLE . ' ADD enclosure_url text NOT NULL');
    $wpdb->query('ALTER TABLE ' . SHASHIN_PHOTO_TABLE . ' ADD enclosure_type varchar(255) NOT NULL');
           }

    If you’re missing the “enclosure_type” line, then put this in your code:

    // if ($foundEnclosure === false) {
//    $wpdb->query('ALTER TABLE ' . SHASHIN_PHOTO_TABLE . ' ADD enclosure_url text NOT NULL');
      $wpdb->query('ALTER TABLE ' . SHASHIN_PHOTO_TABLE . ' ADD enclosure_type varchar(255) NOT NULL');
//}

    Then deactivate and reactivate – this will force it to create the enclosure_type field.

    There was a glitch with my upload to wordpress.org last weekend, and for a short time there was a version of Shashin.php that had the missing line. I’m guessing this is what’s causing your problem. If this isn’t the problem, please let me know.

  15. Aouni August 26, 2008

    Thank you. This is really a great job. I’ll give this version a try.

  16. Flummoxed September 6, 2008

    Hi,

    thank you for this useful plugin. I’ve a question regarding slideshows. Currently, I used a single-image widget to display a single thumbnail link. I would like to click on the thumbnail to display the image in Highslide (i.e. I don’t want it to link to Picasa, but just to obtain my images from the Picasa database and display in Highslide). However, my album contains several photos. How can I make it such that when I click on a thumbnail, a single image slideshow appears in highslide for my whole album?

    Thanks!

  17. Mike September 8, 2008

    Hi – Shashin can’t do that right now, but it’s a good idea. I’ll look into it for the next release.

  18. Sikk September 9, 2008

    This is a wonderful plugin! I am slowly, but surely, figuring out the markup language to customize things a bit more. Questions about the [salbumphotos] tag:

    1) I have it set to 2 columns as 3 run into my sidebar, when the albums are displayed. However once you’ve opened the album, 3 thumbnails would look great. Anyway I could tweak that?

    2) Is there a way to customize the way thumbs are displayed when using the [salbumphotos] tag? For example my thumbnails are separated by horizontal lines, yet your photo page has a box around the thumbs when I click on an album. I edited the shashin.css but it did not change.

  19. Mike September 9, 2008

    1. Yes, you can do that – see here: http://www.toppa.com/shashin-wordpress-plugin#shashin8

    2. It sounds like the CSS for your theme is affecting the display of the thumbnails, as there’s nothing in Shashin that would put horizontal lines between your thumbnails.. Look through your theme’s style.css file for anything that would affect the appearance of images.

  20. Juanjo September 10, 2008

    Hi Mike,

    Been using your plugin at my website and everybody loves it.

    There’s a recent feature addition to your plugin in this thread at wordpress.org:

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/202576?replies=2

    I found those upgrades quite useful, you should maybe take an eye on them and look forward to add them to the plugin.

    Tnx for your work on this.

    Juanjo Gonzalez

  21. Mike September 11, 2008

    Thanks for letting me know. He made some really good additions. I posted a followup to his post in the forum.

  22. Alessandro September 15, 2008

    With wordpress 2.6.2 if I go on Manage/shashin the page is blank.

    Thanks
    Alessandro

  23. Mike September 16, 2008

    Thanks for letting me know! I have not upgraded yet. I’ll check on this ASAP.

  24. admin September 16, 2008

    I’ve upgraded, but I’m not experiencing this problem. If this is still a problem for you, please try deactivating all your plugins except Shashin. Then let me know if you’re still seeing this problem.

  25. Alessandro September 17, 2008

    I have found the problem. Two file display/admin-edit.php and display/admin-main.php were corrupt (0 Kb). I have delete and reinstall all the plugin. Now it’s ok
    Thanks
    Alessandro

  26. pei September 25, 2008

    Hi,
    after upgrade, i can see the album thumbnails, but the all the photos are actually gone. both gone for admin/manage/shashin section and the blog photo pages.

    is it some sort of syncing problem?

  27. Mike September 25, 2008

    Hi Pei – did you deactivate and then reactivate Shashin? There were some database changes in the new version, so you need to reactivate.

  28. pei September 25, 2008

    Mike, thanks for the prompt reply. no it iss active, and all the settings are still there. I don’t know why this is happening. really odd. it happen to both of my blogs. both link to the same picasa album.

  29. pei September 25, 2008

    Hi Mike,
    i did as you suggested- sync all albums again, and it works, it’s just that i need to re-deleted the unwanted albums, but it works this way, maybe this is something to look into in the future update, but many thanks to you.

  30. beerick October 12, 2008

    hello, I’ve been using Shashin for my site for awhile, and was just adding it to my uncle’s blog. So I downloaded the latest shashin (2.2.1) and installed it (WP2.6.2).

    Everything looked good, but when I add an album I get:
    Failed to add album. This was probably a bad connection trying to read the RSS feed. Please try again.

    I tried various things, modified the URL (appended #, tried no album). I made sure that I could wget from my server to picasaweb.

    Then I tried plugging the album into my own far older shashin. And that failed. Then I tried synching one of the albums already on my blog, and that failed.

    Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, cheers. It seems like the problem is either where google’s RSS meets shashin, or deeper in my server. Any hints?

    thanks
    rick

  31. Mike October 12, 2008

    Hi Rick – have you tried again since then? The wget lets you know if the Picasa RSS server is responding, but it doesn’t let you know if the feed is correct.

    If it wasn’t just a temporary problem, are your uncle’s blog and your blog hosted with the same ISP? With an old version and a new version of Shashin failing at the same time, it what seems like the same way, it makes me wonder if there was a change in the server environment.

    Let me know if you’re still having trouble, and I’ll help you debug.

  32. beerick October 14, 2008

    got it to work, thanks! Upgraded MySQL, some other stuff, and like magic. The weird part was that it used to work with my older install, and that failed too.

  33. Macarena Diaz October 24, 2008

    Hello!… this plugin is fantastic but I have a problem. If I am logged in I can see the photos in the highslide box… but if I am not logged in the highslide box does not work.

    can you help me?

    Thanks

  34. Mike October 24, 2008

    Hi Macarena – I’ve never heard of that problem before. Can you give me a link to your site so I can see? (you can email it to me if you don’t want it published in comments here)

  35. anung October 30, 2008

    Mike..

    I want to use FancyBox with Shashin. Can you help me?
    Coz, i want to use JQuery, not Highslide.

    http://fancy.klade.lv/fancy/index/10

  36. Mike November 17, 2008

    Hi Anung – sorry for taking so long to write back. I haven’t used FancyBox before, but after taking a quick look at how it works, I think it might not be too hard to integrate with Shashin (integrating Highslide was a lot of work, but the interface for FancyBox looks to be much more elegant). I’ll have to put this behind some other improvements that people have been waiting for though. So support for it probably won’t be in the next version, but maybe the one after that.

  37. Krissi November 25, 2008

    Thanks for a great plugin. I’m testing it for a larger upgrade of my website (have been using Gallery2). A very easy question that I’m sure there must be an easy answer to, where can I change the default width of the single image? It is set to 640 but my page is only 570, so in order to let the single image look nice, I need to change it for every insert. Is there a way to set the default to 512? Thanks!

  38. Mike November 26, 2008

    Hi Krissi – you can change this in the simage tag. See here:

    http://www.toppa.com/shashin-wordpress-plugin/#shashin5

  39. Krissi November 28, 2008

    Hi again. I have a strange problem with one of my albums. When I remove a picture from the picasa album (both web and local – they are all syncronized), the album in wordpress is not updated correctly leaving “empty boxes” for the missing pictures. I have updated the album several times, and when I check the pictures from the Shashin album admin panel – the pictures are updated and the removed pictures are removed there. But not on the Photo Album page. See what I mean here: http://snuppa.krissi.net/?page_id=1602&album_id=5273009601328580737&title=NRHmedlemmer
    I’m not able to add it again, since I’ve already have linked to the pictures from several posts – and I guess removing and adding the album will break the links.

    Any thoughts about this?

  40. Mike November 28, 2008

    Hi Krissi – you found a bug! I’ll fix this in the next release.

  41. amigo November 30, 2008

    Hi Mike.
    Thank you for a wonderful plugin.

    Please let me question on one.
    Please teach the method of making “<< Photo Albums” the navigation” displayed on a thumbnail page just like your site.

    It is set to option setting “Your page for album photos:” as http://yurulife.org/photo-albums/

    I’m sorry by poor English.

  42. Mike November 30, 2008

    Hi amigo – On my page with the salbumphotos tag, I put the link:

    <a href=”http://www.toppa.com/photo-albums”>« Photo Albums</a>

    The URL for the link is the page that shows my album thumbnails.

    In the next version of Shashin, this will all be easier, and you’ll get a link like this automatically.

  43. Kristiaan December 1, 2008

    Hi there,

    Me again.
    Is there a way to change the display order of the albums when only display a select number of albums using the album key?

    Now they are sorted by publication date in an ascending order and i would like to reverse that so the newest album goes in front.

    Is that possible?

  44. Mike December 1, 2008

    Hi Kristiann – Ah, I hadn’t thought about this before. When you use the sthumbs tag, it will display the photos in the same order you listed them in the tag. But this doesn’t happen with album thumbnails. I’ll fix this in the next version.

  45. GFB December 1, 2008

    Hi Mike – just auto-upgraded, wonderfully nifty thing! Re-sync’d and am back in business.

    One question. On the Manage Shashin page – how would I sort the Albums by “newest” up top? I am guessing (without looking at the code) that I could sort Descending by Album Key…but not 100% without digging in.

    My reasoning is that the current alphabetical works…but to have the newest up top will make it much easier for me to reference the latest images for post inclusion.

    Thanks for a great addon!

  46. Mike December 1, 2008

    Hi GFB – you’ll need to edit some code for this one. It’s at line 548 in Shashin.php:

    $allAlbums = ShashinAlbum::getAlbums(“ORDER BY TITLE”);

    You can change that to any column name in the shashin_album table. In your case, I think you want LAST_UPDATED

    This should be a configurable option. I’ll try to work it into the next release.

  47. Krissi December 2, 2008

    I’d like to change the size of the text for album name on the page that lists all the pictures in a specific album (using salbumphotos). In which file should I search for the code?

    Thanks!

  48. Mike December 3, 2008

    Hi Krissi – look for “.shashin_thumbs_table caption” in shashin.css and add a font-size that you like.

  49. Josh December 8, 2008

    Any idea when you will be able to fix the bug of the thumbnails not being removed from the photo pages when I remove pictures from the Picasa album? Shashin “sees” the changes, because the picture count in Shashin is updated when I sync, but it still leave blank thumbnails with captions on my pages… hope you can find the cause behind this! Thanks.

  50. Mike December 9, 2008

    Hi Josh – this will be fixed in the next release, which I hope to have ready by the end of the month.

  51. Krissi December 12, 2008

    Just for info. I’ve updated my blog to wordpress 2.7 and your plugin seems to work just fine in the new version. 🙂

  52. ben December 13, 2008

    Great plug-in!

    The upgrade to 2.7 caused no issues for me either; however I’ve been trying to find a theme that I like and I have been having some issues. On most of the themes I have tried, the pictures I have listed in a post and the start of the next post wrap onto the same line which makes reading the blog very disjointed. This didn’t happen in the default theme, so I think it is a problem in the theme – just wondering if I could get some pointers as to how to fix it?

  53. Mike December 14, 2008

    Hi Ben – sure, activate the theme you want to use and let me know the URL, and I’ll take a look (you can email it to me if you don’t want to publish it here).

  54. ben December 14, 2008

    Thanks Mike –
    Your suggestions worked great!

  55. Patrick January 14, 2009

    Hi again. I am using the [salbumphotos=160,4,n,y] tag. How can I get it to sort in reverse order of upload (newest first)? I have tried to put taken_timestamp in there with a desc before and after, but I cant get it. Thoughts? I know I am doing something wrong.

    • Mike January 15, 2009

      Hi Patrick – I just posted the beta version of Shashin 2.3 on my site. Try using the new version. It doesn’t require the salbumphotos tag for showing an album’s photos anymore, and there’s an option on the Shashin settings page that lets you control the sort order for the photos.

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