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Phoca Gallery For Large Photo Repositories
For large repositories of photos, we recommend that you use Phoca gallery. A great feature of the component, by Phoca, is the automatic generation of galleries - and thumbnails - based on the directory structure on the server. You place the folders with images in the images/phocagallery folder. Please ensure that there are no spaces in the names of the pictures, otherwise it will not work. We also had to change the permission of the thumbs folder to 0755 in the folder where we placed the images. In addition, we were struggling a while to get SEF working with the component. We initially got 404 errors when we clicked on a thumbnail using the article plugin that comes with the component.
This plugin allows you to insert a gallery in an article (see below).
To solve the SEF issue with the plugin that allows you to place a gallery in an article, you need to do the following:
Step 1: Create a new menu item (or a new menu) and make a link to the Phoca Gallery Component.
Step 2: Go to the modules section and enable the new menu if you have created one for this purpose.
Step 3: Use a menu position such as Phoca (one that does not exist in your template) if you do not want to display the menu in a template position. We used the position Phoca so we can load a menu in this article using load position.
Below is an example of phocagallery with pictures we took of the launch of the STS 129 Space Shuttle. For this example we linked the phoca gallery component directly to a menu item - not using the plugin.
We recommend you that use any the "simple gallery" plugins if you want to use a gallery in an article and that you use Phoca gallery for large photo depositories linked to a menu. Please click on the link below to see Phoca Gallery in action linked to a menu item:
From NASA:
Commander Charlie Hobaugh will lead the STS-129 mission to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Atlantis. Barry Wilmore will serve as the pilot. Mission Specialists are Robert Satcher, Michael Foreman, Randy Bresnik and Leland Melvin. Wilmore, Satcher and Bresnik will be making their first trips to space.
The mission will return station crew member Nicole Stott to Earth. STS-129 is slated to be the final space shuttle crew rotation flight to or from the space station.
Atlantis will deliver parts to the space station, including a spare gyroscope. The mission will feature three spacewalks.
STS-129 is the 31st shuttle mission to the station.
Very Simple Image Gallery for Joomla Comes With Useful Features
We already reported on the Simple Image Gallery, an excellent gallery for Joomla. www.bretteleben.de, the developer of the "Very Simple Image Gallery" Plugin for Joomla! 1.5 is a more "simplified" version of the "Simple Image Gallery" with different useful features.
The modified version comes without a light box but provides for some neat features: The plugin shows one large image, followed by thumbnails below or to the right of the main image. You can also add text and a link to an image, add sub sets of images and select how the gallery displays an image (javascript or with a page reload), features that are not available in the free version of the Simple Image Gallery.
Please keep in mind that the reference to the image folder in the plugin tag is case sensitive.
Generate Automatic Thumbnails With Mavik Thumbnails in Joomla
Till further notice, we have disabled the plug-in since we do not seem to get it right (or Microsoft for that matter). An alternative is the fboxbot plugin and BK-Thumb plugin that are available in the JED.
Sometimes you only need a few pictures in an article. Mavik Thumbnails is a Joomla extension that automatically generates a thumbnail from images in an article.
The Mavik Thumbnails extension does not require you to insert tags in an article. Resizing the image in the editor is sufficient. How it works:
Step 1: Install the plug in and set the directory where the images are in the parameters of the plug in.
Step 2: Insert an image in an article as you would normally do using the editor (remember, you will not use any plug-in tags).
Step 3: Resize the image by clicking on the image and dragging the corners as you would normally do in the editor.
Step 4: Save the article.
Here we have a few examples from photos we took in Australia. If you click on the photo, it will open in a light box. We have included pictures of different sizes. Some may be wider than your computer screen:
Simple Image Gallery Generates Thumbnails Automatically
It took a while to test the gallery extensions that are available to Joomla and that generate thumbnails automatically with shadow and border effects. The free version of the Simple Image Gallery is an excellent extension. The quality of thumbnails is high and a gallery is easily inserted in an article with tags. Below is a demo of the plugin with different file sizes (some pictures may be bigger than your screen when you click on the thumbnail).