Serendipity Forums

I am looking for a style for http://hackerart.at/, which contains a random picture of my Menalto-Gallery2 at http://album.hackerart.eu/ in the sidebar.

When I tried different styles I found out, that a lot of styles don't work. You can try it yourself at http://hackerart.at/ I installed the template-plugin.

The following styles are fine:

Bazooka
Blue
Blue Haze
Blue Iceberg
Carl BlueS
Serendipity v3.0
Carl Green
codeschmiede
Coffee Bar v1.1
Coffee Cup
Costas Nature Theme v0.5
Serendipity v2.3
RTL-Languages v0.3
Earphone
Elitist Latte
Gila Two
Green Mile 1.1
Joshua
Joshua Nino 1.1
Kamouflage v.1.1
MT-Clean
MT-Georgia Blue
MT-Gettys Burg
MT-Plain Jane
MT-Rusty
MT-Trendy
(bei MT3 passt der Titel nicht, das Bild schon)
Newspaper Blog
Party Brown
Powered
BlueGrey
s9thin
safety yellow
slate grey
Tool Box

Looks to me like the problem is with the image size. Templates that use a fixed-size sidebar will crop the picture, or mess up their layout.

You can fix the problem in the affected templates' style.css files.

It's really a design limitation. Perhaps adding a comment in the template description would be a good idea, though.

The menalto sidebar plugin (both the regular and the Unified Sidebar Image plugin) use a url to fetch the image display data directly from the Gallery server. The width is therefore actually set by the Gallery server and not by Serendipity, which makes it really difficult to control from within Serendipity.

I don't use Gallery myself, so I don't know much about it, but if you can find a way to pass a width to the url I can modify the plugin to use it without any difficulty. Otherwise, I would bet there is a tpl file you can edit inside Gallery2 to set the width to what you want.

I am not so familiar with Gallery2, but it looks like the size depends on the preview size, which can be defined by the user. For certains reasons, especially for the users, who don't allow Javascript, I defined the preview size with 350 pixels, which is too large for the most sidebars of s9y, but the mentioned templates are fine, so there obviously is a way to get it work without a resize, although I would like to prefer a resize. Couldn't a resize be done on the fly with convert?

I will post this question in the gallery forum and refer to this thread. See http://gallery.menalto.com/node/57929

From doing a little bit of research it looks like you can do this in the url: Unfortunately, it looks to me like block then includes a full size image displayed at the width specified (not converted, just displayed smaller), which will be substantially larger and therefore slower to download.

There has been another request to make this plugin offer some other options, so I will probably do a little work on it in the near future. If we can sort this out (to your satisfaction, at least) I will include it in the changes I make.

Thanks a lot, please post in this thread, when I should do some tests.

Ok, I just updated the Unified Sidebar Image plugin to support new features for Gallery2.

Basically it adds support for g2_type (not just random) g2_maxSize, g2_linkTarget, and g2_show. I also added caching option, so that server will not do gallery request on every page request.

Honestly, I didn't do a whole lot of testing on this, since I don't have my own Gallery installation. Please let me know if you find any bugs.

I'm not going to backport these changes into the menalto sidebar plugin at this time. If this is something you really, really need, please feel free to drop me a note and explain why the unified sidebar plugin won't work for you. I could probably port the changes over if there is serious incentive.

Please let me know if you have any problems!

I will do tests ASAP. At the moment there are hosting problems. Thanks a lot!

I am very sorry to ask this, but I never did an update. Somewhere I read that available updates are marked red. Sorry, I didn't find out how to update.

No problem... Actually, it looks like the update is not available in Spartacus yet. It should be available tomorrow (I missed the time where it generates, apparently).

When it is available in Spartacus the way you update it depends on which version you have installed.

If you have 1.0x installed you will need to go to "Configure Plugins" and click on "Click here to install a new sidebar plugin". Then you can just head down to the "Unified Image sidebar" plugin (or what ever it is called... search for "unified"). If you currently have it installed, and an update is available, the install icon will be red. If you don't have it installed or there is not an update the icon will appear as normal.

If you have 1.1 installed you can go to "Configure Plugins" and click on the "Check for new sidebar plugins" (at the top) to find updates to any sidebar plugins you have, including this one. If you don't have a plugin installed the update won't show up in the list (Spartacus assume you don't want to upgrade a plugin you haven't installed yet).

Hope that makes sense (and feel free to ask me if it doesn't).

I use 1.0.4 and currently there is nothing red at "Unified Sidebar Image Display" I will try it later.

I tried it out now, it works, but not always as I think it should.

First thank you for your work again and some minor things at the beginning:

The configuration was changed after the update, especially the image-source.

Could you please add the album name to the "displayed fields". Did I fill out the field "target" correctly, I mean without quotes? Please see http://www.hackerart.eu/s9y_unified.png for my configuration.

What does the variable "heading" mean?

Could you please do an _optional_ resize if the image should be _enlarged_?

Now, the thing, which I don't understand, and which is a problem with the templates. I found out, that images are resized to a smaller image _sometimes_. Please reload the blog http://www.hackerart.at/ till http://album.hackerart.eu/d/274-1/06050 ... strakt.jpg appears, it is not resized here or maybe a little bit resized, but not to 300. Some other images were resized. Maybe it depends on the source size, I mean the configuration in the Menalto-gallery2 for the thumbnail-size.

I add:
I watch if the pictures have the same width on the blog. IMHO they should, if they are not smaller than 300. Maybe I am wrong, if I think it should work like this.

Hi hackerart,

Did I fill out the field "target" correctly, I mean without quotes? Please see http://www.hackerart.eu/s9y_unified.png for my configuration.

That looks correct. If those fields aren't showing up let me know and I will try to figure out why.

Could you please add the album name to the "displayed fields".

I don't think so. I used the documentation from here
http://gallery.menalto.com/forum/g2_integration?page=1 to build the new features (third post down). If you can find any further documenation for Gallery2's external block I would be happy add any features I missed.

What does the variable "heading" mean?

I have no idea... The documentation above doesn't describe any of the options.

Could you please do an _optional_ resize if the image should be _enlarged_?

I don't see any way to do this according the documentation I've seen.

Now, the thing, which I don't understand, and which is a problem with the templates. I found out, that images are resized to a smaller image _sometimes_.

I couldn't recreate this while I was fiddling with your blog. Did you turn resize off? Honestly, though, there isn't much Serendipity can do to get images to resize, since the image formatting, text, etc comes directly from Gallery2. This might be a question for the Gallery2 integration forum.