John W. Vanderbeck

The plan for a preview release on Monday (yesterday) got scrapped unfortunately due to my coming down with a nasty flu bug saturday night which kept me pretty much out of it sunday and monday. The worst of it is over though now, and I got a lot of the work I needed to do for the release done before work today. I’ll wrap it up tomorrow and the preview release should go up then.

To get ready for the preview release I thought i’d do a short post here to show some of the capabilities of the plugin as it stands right now.

Inserting single or multiple images into a post (or static page since its the same as far as Wordpress cares) is very easy and is done using quicktags. I am going to show you some of those quicktags here, as well as what the plugin does with them. However, since the plugin replaces the exact quicktags, which would prevent you from seeing them, i’m gonig to be using ()’s instead of []’s. The quicktags would normally be surrounded with []’s. Also the correct quicktags are inside HTML comments. This is so that if you ever decide to stop using the plugin, the quicktags remain hidden. (I am debating thos however as it makes editing a bit more un-user friendly and requires more typing. I’m thinking a better way would be to simply have an option that puts the plugin into a sort of standby mode where ALL it does is hide the quicktags).

For example suppose I wanted to display every photo from my Flickr account thathas the tag “airplane”. I could simply do:

(jp:imagesearch:airplane)

Maybe I want all pictures of airplanes that I took at Orlando International Airport. IE All photos tagged both airplane and oia.

(jp:imagesearch:airplane,oia::all)

I can display a single image with an ID of 40 (More on this ID stuff will be detailed some other time)

(jp:image:40)

Or perhaps a free text search for all photos containing the text “durkie” (My mother’s sheltie), then I could do:

(jp:imagesearch:durkie::text)

The images returned from the above search are of varying sizes and look horrible together like that. Let’s introduce formatitng options and instead tell jPortfolio to display the ’square’ size that Flickr makes of images. Flickr makes a thumbnail version that is a square size so that all images line up nicely. Let’s try that:

(jp:imagesearch:durkie:simple_square:text)

The tags can be more complicated than what i’ve shown you. You can also include in the tag formatting options to make the output different, and this can even be totally customised from the admin options, but its a bit more advanced than I wanted to get into here. I’ll just leave you with one quicky that shows custom formatting. This formatting option, custom1, was configured through the admin menu which means no messing with code. Note how the display of the image is different, and try clickign on the image. All of that was done using the custom formatting.

(jp:image:40:custom1)