I started on some major enhancements to Shashin early in the winter – most notably flickr and twitpic support – but it’s been on hold for a while now. At this point, my guess is that it’ll be summer before I can get back to it.

Please use the comment section on this post for support questions. I will do my best to provide responses twice per week. I will most likely not be able to delve into problems that involve the particulars of your server configuration, such as problems with connecting to Picasa via curl for unlisted albums (as those kinds of issues can sometimes take hours to work through). But general usage questions and Highslide issues are usually easier to address, and I’ll do what I can to help out.

Thanks everyone for your patience, and please remember I’m doing this for free (donations come in very rarely).

UPDATE: I just posted a minor update, version 2.6.3:

• Shashin is now compatible with WP 3 beta 1 (WP 3 appears to automatically unserialize options, which was causing errors)
• Added support for child themes
• Can now uninstall and delete Shashin from the main plugin page (added uninstall hook for existing uninstall function)

• Added support for unlisted Picasa albums (finally!). You must have the PHP curl extension installed to use this feature. I believe most PHP installations include curl, but some hosting providers may need you to ask them to enable it for your account.
• Added ability to group albums by Picasa user accounts when using the [salbumthumbs] tag.
• Bug fix: the EXIF support introduced in Shashin 2.4 caused an error when syncing albums in the Windows version of mySQL. Many thanks to MC for letting me debug this on his Windows server.
• Bug fix: Shashin’s automatic album syncing was interfering with scheduled jobs from other plugins in some circumstances. This is fixed. Note that you also need WordPress 2.9.1 or higher, as this was related to a wp-cron bug in WordPress 2.9.

Also, I’ve installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin, so if you have a support question, you can get an email notification when I reply, instead of having to remember to check back.

UPDATE: I’ve made a couple bug fixes: v2.6.1 fixed another bug related to Windows servers, and v2.6.2 fixed a bug related to Google servers outside the US (see this comment for details).

A couple usability items to point out with it:

• If you mouse over a thumbnail on the left hand side, then the right hand side will show you a larger version of it, and vice versa. I found this a little confusing at first, but it’s actually a good way of using the available screen real estate effectively
• To select a photo, just click it once. Don’t try to drag it. After you click it, you’ll see it appear under the “Selected” heading. If you change your mind and need to remove a photo that you selected, just click it, and it will be removed from the “Selected” area.

The other important new feature is that automatic album syncing is now done every 10 hours instead of once daily. This is because Picasa video URLs now expire every 11 hours, as I described previously. If you have any videos in your albums, then you will want to turn on this feature in the Shashin Settings menu.

There are also two bug fixes:

• “Next” and “previous” links for browsing album photos now work in Google Chrome and Safari (this is actually a workaround for a webkit bug)
• Album title links in the album thumbnails sidebar widget now point to the correct URL

Now back to work on version 3.0…

The expiration time is built-in to the new video URLs, and the videos won’t play after that time passes, even if you’re logged in to Picasa. This leads me to believe that using the Picasa API wouldn’t help (even the code used to display the videos on Picasa’s own pages expires). There’s also a signature key built-in to the URL, so there’s no simple hack to the URL that’ll make it last longer.

The ability to embed videos in your own site was never a documented Picasa feature, so I really don’t have grounds to complain. But I made it a feature of Shashin, so my users do .

I’m traveling over the holidays, but I will try to get a fix released before New Year’s. The only solution I can think of is to change Shashin’s automatic once per day sync’ing feature so that it will sync every 10 hours (an hour before the expiration, to be safe). That way you’ll always have a fresh URL for embedded videos. This won’t be the major new release I’ve mentioned before – it’ll just be a fix for this and a few other minor bugs.

Note: videos added to Shashin more than a month ago still work fine, at least for now. The “old style” URLs in Shashin are still working, and – like I said – they don’t get updated when you sync. It’s only videos you may have added to Shashin within the past month that will give you a problem.

My last Shashin post has about 60 comments, so it’s time for a fresh thread.

I’m back to work on the new version. It’ll include Flickr and Twitpic support, and a WYSIWYG interface for adding photos to posts. I only have at most a few hours a week to work on it though, so look for it around late January.

[srandom=3|7|9,288,2,6,n,left]

It’s also not compatible with the newer shortcode syntax that WordPress currently supports and recommends. I’m thinking of switching to the recommended syntax. So the equivalent shortcode for the above example would be something like:

[shashin type="random" albums="3,7,9" size="288" cols="2" count="6" caption="n" position="left"]

The reason I didn’t use this syntax originally is because it’s a lot more typing. So to make the typing easier, I would also add editor buttons, for both the Visual and the HTML editors. There’s a standardized way to add buttons to the Visual Editor already, and my Koumpounophobia plugin makes it easy to add buttons to the HTML Editor (having buttons for Shashin was my inspiration for creating Koumpounophobia).

New versions of Shashin would have an option to support the old syntax, so you wouldn’t have to rewrite tags in old posts.

So, if I added the new syntax and editor buttons, would you use them, or would you prefer to keep using the old syntax? Please leave a comment and let me know.

And while I’m here: Shashin was one of five image-related plugins (out of the 285 available at wordpress.org) listed in the Weblogs Tools Collection’s article Five Image Related Plugins for your WordPress Site.

(My blog has been quiet recently as I’ve got a big home renovation project going. I’ll post pictures when it’s done. I may not have the opportunity to blog much this month.)

I’m almost done updating the Shashin documentation page. I’ve finished documenting the most important new features. I’ll finish the rest in the next few days.

If you encounter any problems or have any questions, please add a comment to this post.