Shashin 2.1 - Easier Steps for Displaying All Album Photos
Shashin 2.1 is now available. It does not include any new dazzling features, but it has a new, easier to use option for displaying all your album thumbnails, and then have them link to a page on your site that displays all the photos in each album. The Shashin page has instructions on how to do this.
There were 3 problems with how I implemented this feature in the previous (2.0) version of Shashin, but they only became clear to me after hearing feedback from people using Shashin 2.0 in a wide variety of WordPress themes. One problem was that the steps involved were just too complicated for most people’s needs (but the more complex options are still there, if you need greater control of the configuration than the new “easy” way).
The second problem was my attempt to manipulate the title of the page containing the [salbumphotos] tag. Shashin 2.0 tries to dynamically append the title of the selected photo album to the page title. In a rational world this would be easy, but WordPress makes it extraordinarily difficult to isolate and manipulate the title of a page, as reported here. I thought I had come up with a work around. But, as it turns out, my solution was not reliable across all the different WordPress themes that are out there. So, with Shashin 2.1, I have removed all the code that tries to manipulate the page title. It now simply displays the album title as a caption on the table that contains the photo thumbnails. This is much cleaner and shouldn’t cause conflicts with any themes.
The third problem was the [salbumphotos] tag, which is used to display thumbnails for all the photos in an album. In Shashin 2.0, a page with the [salbumphotos] tag won’t play nicely with sidebars that use the wp_list_pages function (for listing links to all the pages on a site). The [salbumphotos] tag only worked correctly if you used it in conjunction with Shashin album thumbnails. You couldn’t just go to the page directly from a sidebar link. This is fixed in Shashin 2.1.
Shashin 2.1 also has a few minor bug fixes, the most important of which is that you can now once again see the photo thumbnails in the Shashin admin panel.
I should point out that, if all you want to do with your Picasa photos in WordPress is display your album thumbnails on a page, and then link them to a page that displays the photos in each album, then I recommend kPicasa Gallery. It has similar features to Shashin in this area, but without Shashin’s management overhead. But if you want to do more than just that, then I recommend Shashin 
.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Dear Michael, A mistake was typing its name by the previous comment.
It’s wonderful and is the best upgrade.
It became very easy to use.
Thank you very much.
Now, I’ll also use this wonderful plug-in habitually.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Michael - fixed my colon issue with this latest release, absolutely fabulous plug-in.
One question I have not found any documentation on. I will be linking to around 4 Picasa Albums for family photos…is there a way similar to the “Album Photos” pages to create a page that shows All Albums for a particular Picasa account?
I am thinking I could link each album into their own page rather than have all Albums drop onto one page. Now I realize I can do so by building a page and inputting the Album Names (or ids or something) into the code variables, but didn’t know if there was an automatic way to accomplish this!
Many thanks.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Hi GFB,
There’s no automatic way to do that at this time. But you can do it with the [salbumthumbs] tag, which is documented here.
In your case you’d want to create a page with the [salbumthumbs] tag, and give it the album keys for just the albums you want. Then it will display thumbnails for only those albums. When you click the album thumbnails, it’ll link to the page containing the [salbumphotos] tag, where it will display all the photos in the album.
This is a more complicated than the new “easy” option, but it gives you a huge amount of flexibility. You can choose any albums you want, you can have the album thumbnails in a post or a page, you can layout the album thumbnails differently from the photos, etc.
May 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Wow - great-looking plugin, just what I was looking for.
I’ve installed it on a new Wordpress 2.5 install for testing, but can’t seem to get the Highslide option to work. When this option is selected, I don’t see the Highslide “magnifying glass” icon when mousing over the thumbnail would expect. Clicking on the thumbnail results in a small “Loading…” box that pops up over the picture, but nothing happens. If I click again outside the “Loading…” box, the plain image is displayed on its own page. It’s as if the Highslide JS is not getting invoked or something.
I’ve tried both IE7 and Firefox browsers, but no difference. It works with the sample images at the Highslide web site, so I don’t think it’s a browser setting.
Any ideas what to look for? Did I miss a step somewhere? The only potential problem I see is that my hosting service (GoDaddy.com) only has MySQL 4.0 rather than 4.1, but it doesn’t seem likely that would cause JS problems.
Thanks!
May 1st, 2008 at 8:05 pm
OK - getting closer. Found one thing I missed the first time: the default Wordpress install on GoDaddy is in the /wordpress subdirectory. So I modified the URLs in the highslide.css file to reflect the actual location.
Now I’m getting the “magnifying glass” cursor when I mouse over a thumbnail. But when I click, it still just brings up the “Loading…” box, and sits there spinning without ever doing anything. I’ve waited up to 5 minutes & nothing happens. Clicking “Loading…” a second time stops it.
Since I have MySQL 4.0, I also made the suggested modifications to ToppaWPFunctions.php (comment out lines 179-181). I also deleted the existing albums from the Manage.Shashin page, re-added them, and re-synced all the albums with Picasweb.
Still the same results: I get the Highslide “magnifying glass” cursor, but clicking on the thumbnail never actually loads anything.
Ideas? Thanks again!
May 1st, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Solved my problem: corrupted upload of the highslide/graphics directory. After browsing similar problems on the Highslide forum, I tried setting hs.outlinetype to null in the shashin.php file. That worked! This meant the problem was an inability to load the highslide graphics files. A quick test of trying to manually download these files in a browser showed they were corrupt. Re-uploaded them (explicitly setting FileZilla FTP to “binary: this time) and everything seems to work fine.
Thanks, and I look forward to moving ahead with this great-lookin plugin!
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Hi Jim - Sorry for not catching your messages sooner. Sounds like your diligence has paid off. Let me know if anything else comes up.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Is there, or will there be any pagination option?
For example, “kPicasa Gallery” plugin has nice option that you can enter number of albums or photos per page and the script automaticly add page navigation at bottom.
It can be very useful option, first of all for those who have lot of pictures and want to organize it, nicer.
One more, when i choose 160px width, all picture thumbs are same size, but when I choose 72px width I get some of them like portrait or landscape shapes, whitch doesn’t look pretty enaught (link http://www.salsanis.com/galerija-slika?album_id=5197716434981344401&title=Treca+salsa+zurka+u+Nisu)?
Btw, the script is great :))) Regards from Serbia.
May 9th, 2008 at 12:26 am
One suggestion for the [salbumphotos] tag: have a parameter that controls album sort order, in addition to the existing photo sort order. I like to show the most recent albums first, but within each album show the photos in chronological (ascending) order. I’d imagine this is a common scenario.
I’ve hacked the existing script to make this happen (adding a DESC keyword to the sql query), but might be a nice option for those that don’t want to touch the code.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Hi Milan - Pagination is a good idea - I’ll add it to the wish list. If you check the Shashin page, it explains that some of the image sizes are special “cropped” sizes. 160 is one of these sizes - it displays all the images 160×160 square.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Hi Jim - that’s a good suggestion - thanks. I try to find the right balance between having good options, but not letting the parameter list become too long and potentially confusing. In this case it might be worth adding one more… I’ll keep thinking about it.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Hi
Just want to say THANKS for this plugin! I was searching for a plugin with so many possibilities for days, and I’m very happy that I found yours which is just perfect. So, thank you so much! 
May 27th, 2008 at 7:20 am
I’m the kPicasa Gallery developper, just wanted to say hi and thanks for the great words! Keep up your work.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Hey Mike - thanks for providing such a great plug-in. It hardly took much effort to get it working on my site, and I’m impressed with the presentation it gives my site