I know it hasn’t been that long since the last release, but it certainly feels like it. The last release of the Lightbox Gallery module was in February of this year – 5 months ago. Okay… Maybe that is a long time after all… The newest release is here though!
There were only a few things slated for this specific release. I wanted to tackle a couple of common requests.
- Better out-of-the-box image listing
- Allow images to have unique titles
- Allow images to be re-ordered
- Fix a folder name length bug
- and a few performance enhancements
That is the overall list of updates. There are a ton of other tiny updates, but they aren’t worthy of making a bullet point about.
User Experience Updates
Now, when you first install and add images to this module, they will have a very consistent layout without requiring any CSS magic, but you can indeed apply your own CSS to it still. That being said, this update might cause a few headaches for anyone that’s applied their own CSS updates to this module. Gone are the days where the images will not neatly be applied in a consistently laid out row/column layout.
FYI… The HTML mark-up hasn’t changed here. Just the CSS itself.
New Features
The images each can now have their very own title and description, allowing me to open the door to other contextual information for each image in the future. Some of the possibilities include tagging users to an image, and geotagging.
The image descriptions are not currently used anywhere on the module, but they will be in a future version. If you have any specific ideas around this, feel free to let me know.
Images have until now been ordered exactly how they are found in the file system, alphabetically. With this release, you now have the ability to re-organize the order that your images are displayed to your website visitors. I made sure to try and keep this process as easy as possible. So, you simply drag and drop the images in the order that you want them to appear, just like you do with the albums.
Miscellaneous & Geekier Updates
Along the way, I fixed one known bug, and found and fixed another one. The known bug was that the field for folder paths did not anticipate long folder names. It does now. The other bug was that this module would not be completely uninstalled. Luckily, I guess no one has uninstalled this module, because the bug was never reported. ;)
There were several areas where I also applied some stronger string handling to allow the module be more scalable for larger implementations. This should realize a faster load and response time for those of you that have larger websites.
What’s Coming Up?
I have some very exciting updates coming to this module in later releases. Among them are new and customizable thumbnail themes, and a release specifically to make this module compatible with DotNetNuke version 6.0.
Want to Download this Version of the Module?
The DNN Forge doesn’t update to show the latest Codeplex releases until sometime around midnight PST, so until tomorrow, you can download the latest release from the codeplex project page.
This blog entry is cross-posted from my personal blog site.