Shashin 2.2 - Slideshows and Built-In Video Display

Aug

Shashin 2.2 - Slideshows and Built-In Video Display

Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Shashin, 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 Shinjuku Gyoen 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 example.

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).

36 Responses to “Shashin 2.2 - Slideshows and Built-In Video Display”

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anung Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 9:32 am
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′
Mike Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 9:42 am
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.
anung Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 9:46 am
wow, fast reply

thanks, i loooove your plugin
John Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
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
John Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I keep getting this error:
hs.addSlideshow is not a function

addHSSlideshow(”group2″)

Not sure if its another plugin conflicting
John Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
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
Mike Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
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.
Martha Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
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.
Martha Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Allright, so it matters… but what to do in order to fix it?
Mike Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
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.
anung Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
ok, installed and working perfectly
John Says:
August 25th, 2008 at 6:43 am
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
Martha Says:
August 25th, 2008 at 9:36 am
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.
Mike Says:
August 25th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
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.
Aouni Says:
August 26th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Thank you. This is really a great job. I’ll give this version a try.
Flummoxed Says:
September 6th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
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!
Mike Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Hi - Shashin can’t do that right now, but it’s a good idea. I’ll look into it for the next release.
Sikk Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:08 am
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.
Mike Says:
September 9th, 2008 at 7:32 am
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.
Juanjo Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
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
Mike Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 7:27 am
Thanks for letting me know. He made some really good additions. I posted a followup to his post in the forum.
Alessandro Says:
September 15th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
With wordpress 2.6.2 if I go on Manage/shashin the page is blank.

Thanks
Alessandro
Mike Says:
September 16th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Thanks for letting me know! I have not upgraded yet. I’ll check on this ASAP.
admin Says:
September 16th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
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.
Alessandro Says:
September 17th, 2008 at 9:52 am
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
pei Says:
September 25th, 2008 at 10:27 am
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?
Mike Says:
September 25th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Hi Pei - did you deactivate and then reactivate Shashin? There were some database changes in the new version, so you need to reactivate.
pei Says:
September 25th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
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.
pei Says:
September 25th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
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.
beerick Says:
October 12th, 2008 at 2:40 am
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
Mike Says:
October 12th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
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.
beerick Says:
October 14th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
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.
Macarena Diaz Says:
October 24th, 2008 at 12:46 am
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
Mike Says:
October 24th, 2008 at 6:43 am
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)
anung Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
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
Mike Says:
November 17th, 2008 at 8:37 am
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.