... Elxis version 2009.3 codename Aphrodite is out, download it from Elxis Download Center (EDC) ...
IOS Gallery
From Elxis Official Documentation
Contents |
Introduction
IOS Gallery is a gallery component for Elxis 2008.0, 2008.1, 2009.0, 2009.1 or newer created by Ioannis Sannos (Is Open Source). You can use IOS Gallery for free for any site and for any purpose you like. The component is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. If you are going to modify this component for any purpose you must release it with the same license as the original (CC 3.0). Version 1.1 is also compatible with PHP 5.3.
IOS Gallery supports unlimited number of categories, tags, SEO PRO URLs, automatic thumbnail generation, multi-lingual pictures title and description, multi-lingual categories title and 2 methods for displaying the pictures, Galleriffic (jQuery) and Lightview (Prototype). Component interface is multi-lingual and it is very simple to use. Set up your categories, upload your pictures, write some titles and descriptions and you are done. IOS Gallery generates automatically tags for your pictures based on the titles you enter during the save of a picture but can also enrich tags by entering user search strings in database! For each tag IOS gallery can show you the number of times each tag has been requested and the number of the returned pictures.
| For your decision on the question which display method to use, Galleriffic or Lightview, besides from the aesthetic part, you should consider JavaScript conflicts. As you may run other JavaScript libraries on your site (mootools for instance) they may conflict with Lightview (Prototype) or Galleriffic (jQuery). Switch to the other display method in this case. That's why we have selected 2 display methods that do not use the same JavaScript library. |
Lightview (Prototype)
Lightview was built to change the way you overlay content on a website.
- Clean: Designed to compliment your content.
- Fast: Smart image preloading.
- Easy: Customizable without having to know CSS.
- Rounded: Adjustable rounded corners, no PNG images required.
- Smart: Content resizes to always fit on your screen.
- Slideshow: One button slideshow.
- Works on all modern browsers.
IOS Gallery displays categories with thumbnails (by default 80X80 pixels) that when clicked the Lightview window appears and shows the large image. It has the advantage that you don;t have to worry about if the large images fits in your template as they appear in a lightbox window. Lightview uses Prototype javascript class.
Permission to use Lightview on your domain is required and can be obtained by paying a small fee. For non-commercial domains this will allow you to use Lightview under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd License. When you get permission for a commercial domain you may use Lightview under the terms of the Creative Commons by-nd License. Depending on the usage (commercial, non-commercial) you have to pay from 3 to 49 euro to use Lightview on your site, in order to be legal.
Galleriffic (jQuery)
The big picture is being displayed next to the thumbnails. As this display method requires more space there is a special setting to resize (HTML resize) thumbnails to lower width (by default 40px). Gallerific supports automatic pagination. You can set the number of thumbnails shown in each page, if you wish the navigation links to be displayed or not and finally, if you wish a slide show to be started automatically.
IOS Gallery also allows you to set various parameters in order for the Galleriffic to suit better in your template. So, you can set the left column (thumbs) width, the maximum picture width and you can also set all pictures to be resized using HTML to a specific width.
Features
- Smart image pre-loading after the page is loaded
- Thumbnail navigation (with pagination)
- Support for bookmark-friendly URLs per-image
- Slide show (with optional auto-updating URL bookmarks)
- Events that allow for adding your own custom transition effects
- Support for image captions
- Flexible configuration
- Graceful degradation when JavaScript is not available
- Support for multiple galleries per page
Configuration
IOS Gallery configuration is straight forward and has informational icons (i) for every option. Hover your mouse over an icon to get help for an option. Options based on the area they apply are divided into tabs. So there is a General settings tab for the general options, a tags tab for settings related to tags display and generation, and 2 other tabs, Gallerific and Lightview for settings related to Gallerific and Lightview accordingly.
Multi-lingual content
You can add categories title and pictures title and description in up to 4 languages (IOS dialects technology). If a user has selected a fifth language he will see the categories/pictures information in the main language. Off course the rest of the interface will be in his selected fifth language. The available languages are set in IOS Gallery configuration and you can select from the list of the Elxis globally published languages. The main language is set automatically to the web site default language. If you don't see a language that you want to enable in IOS Gallery configuration this is because this language is un-published in Elxis. First publish this language at the Elxis Languages manager (Site -> Languages manager -> site languages) and then return to IOS Gallery configuration to set your languages.
Watermark
IOS Gallery allows you to easily add watermark on your gallery pictures in order to protect them. You can place watermark in 3 positions on your pictures. Depending on the chosen position IOS Gallery will set the proper font size, add or not shadow on the watermark text and set the text's opacity (30% or 100%). Notice that depending on the watermark text IOS Gallery calculates automatically the font-size! The watermark is added only on the large images, not in thumbnails. For best results the pictures should be optimized for the web (72 dpi). Below is a list of the watermark positions and some notes for each one of them.
Watermark in the center of the picture.
The watermark covers the 50% of the picture's width, the font-size is increased/decreased respectively in order to fit in this area. The watermark text has 30% opacity (transparency) and white shadow (the text colour is black). It is aligned center both horizontally and vertically.
Watermark in bottom or top left corner.
The watermark can cover up to the 100% of the picture's width, the font-size is increased/decreased respectively in order to fit in this area. The maximum font size is 13 pixels. The watermark text has no opacity (transparency) and no shadow. It is displayed in the top or bottom left corner.
Tags
Tags (or labels) add search functionality in IOS Gallery and also are important from a SEO point of view. Tags are nothing more than characteristic keywords or small phrases that describe a set of pictures. Normally they created automatically when you add new pictures by analysing the pictures title and description. Tags are stored in database and they are continuously updated by user requests. You are able to know the hits for each tag, like a statistical program would do for a keyword in your site, and the tag weight, the number of the pictures this tag fits in. You can also create manually tags for any language, delete existing ones or those with zero weight or zero hits.
Searching though tags
You can create direct search links to your IOS Gallery from anywhere and for any keyword being at least 3 characters long. To do so, create links like this (SEO PRO URL):
If you have enabled the option to update tags in database from user requests then if the search return results the keyword will be inserted in database as a tag and maybe be displayed in the Tags Cloud if it has enough hits (Tags Cloud order tags by their hits ascending - not by weight! ).
SEO PRO URLs
IOS Gallery has SEO PRO support for search engines and human friendly URLs. These URLs defers based on the Elxis version.
Up to Elxis 2008.1 IOS Gallery URLs start from com_gallery
From Elxis version 2009.0 and newer IOS Gallery URLs start from gallery
IOS Gallery detects automatically your Elxis version to generate the proper URLs.
| Up to Elxis 2008.1 the "gallery" SEO PRO prefix was reserved for component Star Gallery. But as Star Gallery development stopped and replaced by IOS Gallery the "gallery" SEO PRO prefix from now on is used by IOS Gallery. |
Static cache
IOS Gallery has Static Cache support. During installation a new entry is entered into Elxis Softdisk in section STATICCACHE with name COM_GALLERY. If you have enabled static cache on Elxis 2009.0 or newer then Elxis will cache your Gallery pages (except from the tags pages). If you want to disable static cache for IOS Gallery then just delete that Softdisk's entry. You can re-enter it any time. Note that static cache requires Elxis 2009.0 or newer.
Translations
IOS Gallery has a multi-lingual interface and released in several languages. If there is no translation available in your language you can translate the english file (english.php) to your language and send me your translation in order to add it in the component and become available for other users too. Find me (username: datahell) at the Elxis forums and send me your translation or attach it in a special post I have opened for IOS Gallery translation.
Interconnectivity
The Easy Gallery bot can display images from an IOS Gallery category inside any Elxis content item (article).
