It is now possible to page (next/previous) photos in a gallery. This feature has been requested for a long time and improves the usability of the galleries. Before this update, when a thumbnail in a gallery was clicked, the main entry, description, photo and comments were shown, but the gallery navigation was lost; you could only click the browsers back button to return to the gallery page. Now the gallery navigation is maintained and photos in a gallery are grouped together so that only those photos in that gallery are shown.
For example, here's the gallery page:
Now when the thubmnail is clicked, the main photo is shown, but the gallery information is retained and the paging (next/previous) only pages the photos in the gallery:
All PixyBlog themes have now been updated to use the gallery paging, but for those who have customized their themes, please read this discussion about how to get this working for you.
Also included in this update is the ability to have empty galleries and sub-galleries. Before empty galleries were not displayed on photoblogs, even if a sub-gallery had a photo in it. This means that galleries can now be structured in a more hierarchal way and if a sub-gallery has a photo, then the parent gallery is now shown.
Note: we have noticed a slowdown in the page loading times for gallery pages. This we are working on and they should be back to full-speed shortly.
As always, feedback here in the comments or in our discussion forum is always welcome.
- Pixy Team
It's been 16 months since we've changed the design of the pixyblog.com, so it's about time for an update. Today sees a new front page and other smaller updates on sub-pages. The main difference you'll see is the slideshow of the latest photos. For this we're using the Galleryview slideshow script by Jack Anderson.
The slideshow is a jQuery plugin; which means it's dependant on the jQuery javascript framework. Our decision to use this framework marks a change from what we were using; the Prototype framework. In the past year or so jQuery has become more active and there are many more plugins now available which suit our needs. So we will be gradually moving all the PixyBlog themes to use jQuery instead.
The Galleryview plugin appears to be out-of-development, but it's a great plugin and we plan to expand it's features so that it can be easily integrated into our different themes. More on this to follow.
jQuery is great. It's simple, powerful and widely supported amongst all those different web browser out-there. It also has a ton of plugins that you can use straight away. As I mentioned we are moving to jQuery across all our sites and all our themes. Sven's already moved his theme to use jQuery (with a little help).
We tweeted a while ago about trialling some advertising across our blogs, and this is now part of our front page. Our advertisers are carefully choosen, so you won't be seeing any ads for online casinos, visa for the US or the likes. There will be a separate news article soon about advertising options and also one of our advertisers; Naturpixel.
More photos, bigger photos. We've tried to use the front page space to increase both the size and number of photos from our bloggers. We're not quite finished yet, but we liked the changes thus far so much we decided to go-live with what we've got. Over the next couple of weeks we will be tweaking the pixyblog.com site (and sub-sites) to speed-up the loading time and also try and squeeze-in some more photos and dynamic features.
We've tested the site on most of the latest browser (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome), but please let-us-know if you're seeing some display issues. Also, we've updated our style sheets so before you do report a bug, try refreshing your browser a few times to see if you've got a cached version of any of these.
Finally, any thoughts or feedback very welcome!
- Pixy Team
9:53am Saturday (GMT) - Time in GMT
We're currently in the process of upgrading the Pixy system. Follow us on Twitter for more up-to-date details.
More details to follow shortly.
10:46am Saturday (GMT) - Time in GMT
Update mostly completed. A task will be running for the next 24 hours to update any missing thumbnails from users photoblogs. The main purpose of this update is to fix the problems with the new media server, although there are some other behind-the-scenes changes as well.
- Pixy team
Some new features our users should be aware of...
Two new functions are now available for all blogs at Pixy.
Both of these are available as simple macros which can be added to blog page templates. Also, the methods behind the macros are available to create a custom display of the entries. You can read more about these functions and see live demo's of each on our wiki. Just check-out the following articles:
For those who are using our template language, we are in the process of updating our wiki with more example code and improving the reference library.
For all blogs at Pixy we have updated the standard social bookmarking links which are included in some themes. We have now moved to using AddThis as our preferred social bookmark tool. You can see an example of the default bookmarking links below:
To add these to your blog, check-out the #showSocialBookmarks() macro. Also, check-out addthis.com to find-out how to change the default links displayed.
Finally, our featured photographer blog is back. After a long break this months photographer is the excellent Richard Hollingworth of 635 Images.
A few new features are now available for all blogs at Pixy. Bloggers can now make backups of their photos, uploads, entries & comments using our new export feature. This combined with our existing import feature gives bloggers a standard way to move their data around the many different blogging platforms out there.
Using the Moveable Type Import Format bloggers can make a backup of their entries & comments to a text file which can be easily imported to a number of blogging platforms including MoveableType, Wordpress and Blogger. Also available through our export feature is the backing-up of photos, uploads and watermarks. These files can now all be downloaded as Zip files. These features are all available through the admin area; 'Blog > Import' and 'Blog > Export' pages.
It's now possible to make backups of almost all the content in your blog. Next-up will be the ability to back-up & restore blog themes.
- Pixy team
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