We released an update to DM Albums™ yesterday which includes two new settings in the DM Albums™ Admin Panel: Transition Effect and Transition Time:

Transition Effect will change the transition between photos from SLIDE to FADE. In the slide setting (default), photos slide in from the left, which in the fade mode, one photo fades into the other.

Transition Speed is measured in milliseconds and adjusts how quickly this transition occurs; the default of 400 is a good place to start, but you can slow it down or speed it up if you’d like.

Posted in DM Albums, Latest News & Announcements, Usage | 16 Comments »

A few questions have come our way regarding the sizing and styling of DM Albums, which I thought I would answer here.

Sizing the Albums
As for sizing, DM Albums™ fills the area that it’s positioned in, meaning that it fills whatever space is available in the post. Some users prefer to have a fixed size that is perhaps smaller than that, or would like to have the album float to the left or right of their text. For that, we’ve added a div that surrounds the albums, which can be sized, positioned, and styled however you want. The div is assigned a css classname:

.dm-albums-galleria-container

Excellent tutorials and references on how to work with CSS can be found online, including at W3 Schools.

If you’d like to control the size of a specific album, we also have made available a height and width parameter for the DM Albums™ short tag:

[dmalbums path="/path/to/album/" width="400" height="300"]

Styling the Album
As of version 3.0, the style sheet that controls DM Albums™ is located at:
dm-albums/galleria/themes/classic/galleria.classic.css

Full control over the layout is given in that style sheet. For example, to change the color of the album and thumbnails from black to white, make the following changes to the classes .galleria-container and .galler-thumbnails .galleria-image:

.galleria-container {
    position: relative;
    overflow: hidden;
    background: #FFF;
}
.galleria-thumbnails .galleria-image {
    height: 40px;
    width: 60px;
    background: #000;
    margin: 0 5px 0 0;
    border: 1px solid #FFF;
    float: left;
    cursor: pointer;
}

To change the color/opacity of the captions, you can change the background and opacity/filter properties in the .galleria-caption class:

.galleria-caption
{
	position: absolute;
	width: 100%;
	bottom: 0px;
    left: 0px !important;
    padding-top: 10px;
    padding-left: 10px;
    padding-right: 10px;
    text-align: center;
    background: #000000;
    color: #dddddd;
    font: 11px helvetica,sans-serif !important;
    font-weight: normal !important;
    opacity: 0.55;
    z-index: 1;
    filter: alpha(opacity=55);
}

Posted in DM Albums, Usage | 5 Comments »

Thanks to the community for their feedback and input, we are ready to issue a service release on DM Albums, version 3.1.3. The following items are addressed:

• Bug fixes, including elimination of WordPress Admin issues (DM Albums™ was breaking some WordPress Admin tools), dm-albums-external.php is now working, and various miscellaneous ui tweaks.
• Re-introduction of Direct Download option
• Improved IE8/9 support (requires a theme with a valid doctype definition)
• DM Albums™ Admin Panel options allowing to choose a JQuery inclusion approach: Google JQuery library (default), deregister and replace the standard WordPress JQuery library, or Manual where the JQuery library is not loaded by the plugin and is instead loaded by the theme, giving more control to the user.

Note: In order for DM Albums™ to work in an external configuration, several libraries need to be included in (preferably) the header of the document. The new function dm_loadjavascript is provided for this purpose.

<?php

include($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] . “/wp-content/plugins/dm-albums/dm-albums-external.php”);

dm_loadjavascript();

dm_printalbum(“/wp-content/plugins/dm-albums/preview/”);

?>

For anyone having trouble with the 3.x release, the previous version is still available here.

Posted in Latest News & Announcements | 25 Comments »

We had a user ask a question regarding some customization. DM Albums™ previously allowed for adjusting thumbnail height, but that has been removed for this release. This is pretty easy to adjust, though, and I thought I’d share the instructions:

Thumbnail size:
In javascript/galleria.php, change line 26 to have whatever size you want:

    $size_thumb = "&width=60&height=40";

But changing the thumbnail height will screw up the positioning of the caption, so you’ll need to change the bottom: value in galleria/themes/classic/galleria.classics.css

    .galleria-info {
    width: 100%;
    bottom: 60px;
    left: 0px;
    z-index: 2;
    position: absolute;
}

This will place the caption at the right height. You’ll have to mess around with this a little, but whatever the height is of the thumbs plus 20 should do it.

Caption font size:
In the same file, you can also adjust the font of the caption:

.galleria-caption{
    position: absolute;
    width: 100%;
    bottom: 0px;
    padding-top: 10px;
    text-align: center;
    background: #000000;
    color: #dddddd;
    font: 11px helvetica,sans-serif !important;
    font-weight: normal !important;
    opacity: 0.5;
    z-index: 1;
    filter: alpha(opacity=50);
}

Permanent Navigation Hints
As for making the image navigation hints permanent, just add the following line after the idleTime: 2000 line at line 76 of javascript/galleria.php:

idleMode: false,

Posted in Latest News & Announcements | 7 Comments »

After almost two full years since the last update, we’re very pleased to announce we’ll be releasing DM Albums™ 3.0 this weekend.

There are some major changes in store for this round:

• The DM Albums™ presentation layer has been replaced with a full javascript/css album, powered by Galleria: fast loading, fully mobile-compatible, and streamlined fullscreen and lightbox capabilities.
• Appearance fully customizable through CSS
• Disappearing captions bug has been resolved
• Captions, links, and album titles are all moved into the wordpress database
• The backend DM Album Management system is largely left unchanged

Thanks for everyone’s patience and support over the past few years. Our team’s time has been severely limited, but we’ll make every effort to support the influx of support requests that are sure to come with such a substantial release.

Posted in DM Albums, Latest News & Announcements | 33 Comments »