Shashin Update

On June 11, 2011 by Mike With 33 Comments - WordPress

I’ve updated the dev version of Shashin 3 on GitHub. If you installed it before, you’ll need to do a fresh installation with this release, as there are database changes. Note you can install Shashin 3 side-by-side with an existing Shashin 2 installation – they will not interfere with each other. The functionality is still limited to the Album management screen. The changes are to internal structure (the dependency injection container is more robust, and I straightened out some issues with the overall object model). Please see the installation steps in my earlier post about Shashin 3.

I won’t be making further changes to Shashin 2 on wordpress.org. I know that many people have been experiencing seemingly random problems synchronizing albums since Picasa switched to using https earlier this year. Fixing this is not practical in Shashin 2. Shashin 3 does its album synchronizing in a different and more robust way. I do my work on Shashin in 20 minutes batches as I ride back and forth to work on the subway (that’s when I have time), so I’m focusing on the new version only.

Please use the comments section for questions, feedback, and feature requests for Shashin 3.

33 Comments

  1. Ray June 13, 2011

    Found your work by chance when looking for a plugin to do Picaso with at another blog. Awesome work is about all I can say. I will be looking forward to the 3.x release, though in the meantime I am going to get going with the prior version. I do have a test blog so once I get it going I will give the test a go as well.

  2. Mike June 13, 2011

    Fantastic – thanks. One person has already found a problem I missed in my testing of Shashin 3 so far, so more testing is welcome.

  3. Paul June 21, 2011

    Hello,

    I tried installing Shashin on our WordPress installation and it installed okay, but I’m getting the following error message when trying to add an album:

    ShashinAlbum::setUserAlbums – Failed to parse album feed.

    Our albums are private and I’ve inserted the username and password in the settings section. Any ideas?

  4. Dave June 22, 2011

    Hi Mike,

    Just replaced the default Picasa embed code with Shashin, and it’s like a breath of fresh air! So much easier to use and looks much cleaner.

    One problem I’m having is with album lists (generated using the [salbumlist] code which are quite far down a page. They obviously cause the page to reload in order to display the thumbs for that album. But it doesn’t scroll to the right place – it just leave the page back at the top and so the user thinks something has gone wrong. If they do scroll down, they will see that the album has opened.

    Hoping that this can be fixed (could it be done with an anchor?).

    And while I’m here, another plea for a straight floating list from salbumlist rather than a table 🙂

    Finally, with fluid WordPress layouts, I don’t necessarily know the width of the content area, and would also like to be able to specify ‘max’ for whatever will fit in the browser.

    Looking forward to V3 🙂

    Dave

    • Mike June 23, 2011

      Hi Dave – in the next version my intention to do this with an ajax call (like google maps works), so the photo images will come in without a full page reload

  5. JuHe June 23, 2011

    Hi!
    Thanks for the awesome plugin!

    I can’t figure out howto add captions to images, when I use table of album thumbnails ([salbumthumbs=pub_date desc,3,y,n,center]). What I want is that when I click an album, I can see titles for images in image thumbnail view or higlight mode.

    Thanks in advance!

  6. Mike June 23, 2011

    Hi JuHe – you can turn on the photo captions in the settings page for Shashin. The shortcode controls how the album thumbnails are displayed, so I needed to use the settings page to let you control how the photos are displayed after you click an album thumbnail.

  7. Jeff July 9, 2011

    Hi there-
    I’ve just moved my picasa photos from a regular gmail account to a google Apps account as described here:
    http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=189356

    Now all the 180 existing Shashin albums are OK, because google is performing a redirect. But when I try to add a new album, I get the error message:
    “That is not a valid URL for your Picasa server.” I don’t know if its the same HTTPS issue that everyone else is talking about, or its related to the fact that I have a new user name. I tried putting http://picasaweb.google.com in the “Your Picasa Server” box, as well as my credentials in the email/password boxes, because I have some obscured-link albums.

    Right now, I’m not even able to add a fully public album into Shashin, let alone a ‘Limited, anyone with the link’ album.

    • Mike July 16, 2011

      Hi Jeff – several people are having trouble sync’ing albums with the current version of Shashin due to changes on Google’s side. I can’t fix it in the old version easily. I am working on the new version which handles the feeds more robustly.

  8. Eduard July 10, 2011

    Hi,

    I’ve been using Shashin for a week now, and since a few days I have a problem..
    I added new albums to Picasa and succesfully added them to Shashin. But.. now the albums on my website are not ordered the right way..

    I made a page with the tag: [salbumthumbs=pub_date desc,5,y,y,left]
    So my albums should be ordered by publication date in descending order.. but thay are ordered in a strange way.. Older albums (I uploaded months ago) are displayed first and the new (uploaded) albums come after that. But not by publication date, but by add date and alphabet combined :S..

    Do you have any idea what might be wrong?

    Thanks!

    • Eduard July 12, 2011

      Never mind, problem causes by myself

  9. Ty July 15, 2011

    Hi,

    I see that Shashin 2 has been frozen, but I wanted to report an issue with Shashin 2 in case there is a known fix that doesn’t depend on waiting until Shashin 3 is released.

    Shashin 2 had been working fine for over a year, but recently I became unable to sync albums. The error reported on the Tools > Shashin page reads as follows:
    “ShashinAlbum::setAlbumPhotos – Failed to update record for photo ID 2147483647. SQL Error:”

    It seemed to happen right after the Google’s recent “makeover” for Google+, but I’m only speculating that has anything to do with it.

    I found this page:
    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-shashin-error-message-with-widgets
    which reports the same error message. Here, it was suggested that the problem stemmed from running MySQL 4 or WordPress on Windows, but I’m running MySQL 5 on Linux.

    Any ideas?
    Thanks, Ty

    • Mike July 16, 2011

      Hi Ty – several people are having trouble sync’ing albums with the current version of Shashin due to changes on Google’s side. I can’t fix it in the old version easily (it’s also hard for me to troubleshoot because I can’t reproduce the problem – it still works fine for me). I am working on the new version which handles the feeds more robustly.

      • Nick July 24, 2011

        I can provide some links that can’t be added to shashin if you want to test it.

  10. gaspard July 18, 2011

    Hi mike

    How do I can use Shashin into my template
    It would be great to call a function that use an album ID stored into a custom field
    Settings would be on Shashin set up page…
    This way it would be easier to maintain website style.

    Regards

    • Mike July 20, 2011

      Hi – take a look at the documentation:

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

      In the section that describes the tags, it also describes how to call the underlying PHP functions directly

      • gaspard July 20, 2011

        Yes but the underlying PHP for “Displaying a table of photos from a single album – the [salbumphotos] tag” is not shown
        Tanks for your answer

        • Mike July 21, 2011

          Ah, I never wrote a wrapper for that one, but you can still do it. The syntax is a bit more involved. Here’s an example (I haven’t tried this, but it should work). You can leave out any arguments you don’t need.

          $albumThumbsArgs = array(
    'album_key' => '2',
    'max_size' => 160,
    'max_cols' => 3,
    'caption_yn' => 'y',
    'description_yn' => 'y',
    'order_by' => 'picasa_order',
    'float' => 'center',
    'clear' => 'none'
);

echo ShashinPhoto::getAlbumPhotosMarkup($albumThumbsTags);
          • gaspard July 26, 2011

            the last line must be :echo ShashinPhoto::getAlbumPhotosMarkup($albumThumbsArgs);
            $albumThumbsTags is not working…

            will you add the wrapper on the next version?
            Thanks a lot for your help

  11. Eduard July 19, 2011

    Hi,

    I’m using the plugin (version 2.6.3) and it works fine.
    There is only one problem.. When I use another plugin (The Events Calendar), the css-file of Shashin isn’t loaded.
    I have a bit of knowledge about programming, but I cannot find the reason why this is happening.

    To be precise:
    I use Shashin as a widget on all pages (in the footer) to display a list of albums.
    This is displayed the way I want to on every page, but gives problems when I go to a page with The Events Calendar implemented. (I’m using The Events Calendar as a widget on all pages too, but this is not giving any problem).
    I figured out that the Shashin widget is working on this page (in the footer), but that the stylesheet isn’t loaded.

    Do you have any idea how to fix his?

    Thanks!

    • Mike July 20, 2011

      Hi Eduard – are you sure the css file itself is not actually loaded? Could it be that the file is being loaded, but that some of it’s css is being overridden by the other plugin? For it to not be loaded at all because of another plugin would be pretty weird. If you give me a link to the page I can take it look.

  12. Jeff July 23, 2011

    I can imagine the headache of dealing with Google changes. I just tried installing the v3 version, and had some trouble. I opened an issue on GitHub for it.

  13. Nick July 24, 2011

    The problem is – v3 does nothing (here at least). It created an empty options page in admin and that’s that so far. I have some albums that I just can’t add to Shashin and this turns out to be a bit of a problem now really.

    Do you have any suggestion for the workaround please? Maybe it is possible to patch the database?

  14. Mike July 24, 2011

    Hi Nick, Jeff – sorry for the trouble. The version I uploaded to GitHub yesterday had a bug in it that caused the Shashin Tools menu to not display if you didn’t have albums loaded. I just uploaded a fix to GitHub. I also have some of the new shortcodes working – I’ll write a post in the next day or two with instructions.

    • Nick July 24, 2011

      Great, now all albums imported, this part worked fine. Which short codes can I use? And what about Shashin 2 – can I disable it now? Should I? Or is it better to use v3 only for the problematic albums?

      • Mike July 24, 2011

        Hi Nick – I just wrote this page, which should answer your questions:

        http://www.toppa.com/shashin-3-development-progress

        Shashin 3 is still a work in progress, so you’ll want to keep using Shashin 2 for now (but I definitely appreciate people testing Shashin 3 and giving me feedback).

        • Nick July 25, 2011

          Oh, no albums output yet. That’s the only thing needed to get rid of Shashin 2. Is it possible to have albums any time soon? It would be just great. I could hack my way further.

  15. Mike July 27, 2011

    Hi Gaspard (it looks like we hit the depth limit on the reply thread above). If I forget, please feel free to remind me.

  16. Nick July 27, 2011

    I do keep an eye on it, but comments are closed for that page, and there is no automated notification for update.

  17. Mike July 28, 2011

    Hi Nick – I will tweet significant updates as well – I’m @mtoppa

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