Photos Module Update in Dolphin 7.1
Photos is a such a hot topic in internet/technology/social-networking sector that it would be a crime to leave the photos module unchanged in Osho. So, we're bringing a few improvements that make Photos (and later other media modules) so much better looking and significantly more intuitive for users.
Improvements are coming both in uploading and viewing experience, so community sites that rely on photo sharing will likely make their users very happy. Have a look at what we have to show so far...
Photos Home
Default selection of blocks for homepage is now different. It now features the new small calendar, latest featured photo, tags, standard photos blocks and an "Albums" block with new display style. Naturally, you can re-confirgure it via Page Builder, but this is what we think is a nice default mix.
You may also notice that Latest Featured Photo block already received an updated layout style. More interesting, however, is how Albums look now...
Albums
There're many different ways social networks and photo sharing sites display photo albums. The most simple approach is to show just one cover photo and somehow hint that it's an album (fake-photo-stack underlay is one way). Then there're different fancy javascript tricks with rotating photos, or unfolding groups, etc. Those don't seem to be stable enough, though.
After a lot of thinking and trying, we developed our own "vision" of how alums should look...
Each album is displayed as a sequence of photos that are in it. Depending on available space it may display up to 15-20 photos, but in narrow blocks it would normally show at least 4.
When there're not enough photos to display it would show blank spaces, thus encouraging users to upload more photos to their existing albums. We've also added an admin setting that regulates how many photos required to start displaying the album in public blocks.
We had a chance to play with the new albums for the last 10 days or so and they seem to work great - actually creating a bit of incentive (infinite urge, in my case :P ) to find something else to upload.
The Photo Page
Again, some layout tweaks, a bit more sensitive selection of default blocks and removal of unnecessary bloat resulted in a much better looking individual photo page.
One very important addition is the new "RECOMMEND" block, that adds common social recommendation buttons (like, +1, twit, pin). We mentioned this block when announcing Blogs module revamp, so now you get to see what it is. It's going to be available for all content pages.
Darkroom Effect
Most photos are known to be better viewed with darkened background, which removes intensive light from around the image and directs viewer's focus to the content of the photo without distractions. So, he comes a simple, yet very helpful little feature - when users click on a photo, they'd have the page background darkened. Looks like this...
As you may see, it really brings up the photo and creates a comfy viewing atmosphere.
Other Changes and "Coming Soon"...
Some other important updates that we're working on right now include an improved "Upload Photos" system, where users can start uploading photos without choosing an album first. Album will be generated automatically or can be chosen after upload.
There're tens of smaller tweaks that are still popping in and out, but they are too many to cover in detail. Along with the system-wide improvements and larger updates they are forming a generally more sleek and pleasant user interface in Photos module. Most of the improvements in Photos are being propagated to other media sharing modules as well.
This is it for Photos for today, but stay tuned - this week will be packed with news!
PLUG
Dolphin 7.1 will be a direct upgrade from Dolphin 7.0.9. Licenses are not version-sensitive, so current license will work with 7.1 just fine. It's a good idea to buy a license now, since prices are likely to go up soon.
The new Dolphin solution is powered by UNA Community Management System.
I hate 'em.
PADLOCKS
First and foremost, I'd like to acknowledge that there is an issue and we are well aware of it. We do not ignore it and we understand that in some situations it may become rather annoying.
Padlocks appeared as a solution to the old privacy implementation in Dolphin, where we used to display photo thumbnails for all photos, and would only secure the large photo by checking individual privacy. So, the system is designed to check privacy setting during display stage, see more
As for the block with album photos for browsing... We've been trying a few things, but it's a tricky case. In your example there's a very custom Flash slideshow, and we had similar Cooliris thing, but it appears to be not so straightforward see more
btw nice work on the albums.
A thumbnail strip gives the user a way to quickly view every photo in the album, and something like that is very important..... then if you could just update the big photo and comments via ajax. The thumbnails don't have t be displayed very large ... you could size them down for the strip via css, then popup see more
Empty spaces aren't visually appealing to me. There will be albums which don't have enough photos. Doesn't it makes more sense to either allow admin to control default number of photos displayed (per album) or simply remove the empty spaces (preferred)?
It's never made sense to me that 'social' software inhibits social interaction this way.
In addition, even for people who are obsessive about checking their posts to see who has responded may MISS it b/c comments are not only nested by default but don't even SHOW the total nested comment counts. This misleadingly hides the number of comments and someone would have to not only obsessively look for comments, but worse - they'd have to obsessively expand every level see more
Multiple photos uploading with single browsing window;
Auto slide show with display timing control;
Capable to embedded music;
Display albums meeting privacy setting only, get rid of these Locked one;
These are some of very basic feature required for photo album. So far, the beset album I installed is the Art Album module from AndrewP.
The photos home page especially is a big improvement.
2 things I would really like to see...
admin ability to create photo albums that all users can upload into... maybe this can be integrated into where you choose which cat to place photos into when uploading???
also, GROUP photos! please allow to create group albums for group users to upload to!
Really looking forward to 7.1
Thanks
I have to remind, however, that Dolphin 7.1 is for the most part a "face-lift" update with a limited (read - "short") development timeframe. We try to concentrate on bringing overall look and feel together without changing too much in the platform structure, and without adding too many new features. Some ideas are VERY tempting, but every little thing we decided to squeeze in can potentially set us back for weeks. We're see more
http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/ticket/1137
to have a button UPLOAD PHOTO
linked to user albuns chooser
UPLOAD PHOTO | NEW ALBUM | MY ALBUNS
that was the first thing I did when I set up the community last year
@fitted404
I agree to the notification, it would need maybe some "marker", like + for Google or @ in other systems, so if you write SOMEWHERE a comment like "thanks @XYZ", the user XYZ will get a notification (which form ever)
No ugly padlocks though :-)
Is there even a remote chance that the photos module can be separated into two distinct component parts? One that handles nothing but albums viewable on a members profile, and a second part that handles the shared photos concept. It would be nice to have an easy way to completely rid a site of shared photos without performing major surgery.
With photos - or more specifically Videos (writing here as no video note yet!) - please consider the option to create Categories, and then sub-categories instead of just cats...
This for Videos makes things much better for user navigation.
For example, with sub cats, I could list cats as A,B,C,D,E,F... etc
then have sub cats for things like Bands names alphabetically under each Cat.
It makes things much more user friendly when see more