General Support: Plogger Hacks

1. As I was altering gallery.css, I found it pretty confusing because of the random and disorganized structure of the document itself. Here is the organized version of that (I have added could of extra classes to alter the appearance to my needs but for the most part, it does correlate with the original):

http://www.informity.com/gallery/code/figure-1.txt

2. By checking the option "Use Cropped Square Thumbnails?", the generate_thumb() function (in plog-functions.php) does not seem to produce a desired effect. Even with zoom-crop, the thumbnails generated are not of a perfect square and that is because only width of the thumbnail is indicated. I rewrote that portion of the code to produce a perfect square and even though the image is slightly deformed, it is much easier to align multiple thumbnails in a row (note how "lrg" thumbnail is left intact to preserve the ratio):

http://www.informity.com/gallery/code/figure-2.txt
http://www.informity.com/gallery/code/figure-3.txt

3. Speaking of the option above, I believe that adding one more option will greatly improve customization. Imagine something like:

- Crop thumbnails to a perfect square (Yes/No) or...
- Crop thumbnails to a fixed width (px)
- Crop thumbnails to a fixed height (px)

4. I found that jump menu and search box are hard to align to achieve a consistent appearance in both EI and Mozilla (Firefox). To eliminate this issue, I placed each of those into its separate table cell (divs would certainly be better), added two extra classes (please, see figure-1 for jump_menu_cell and search_cell classes) and voila!:

http://www.informity.com/gallery/code/figure-4.txt

5. In breadcrumbs navigation, image file name does not look good. Perhaps, image caption could be a better (first) choice for each image presentation?

http://www.informity.com/gallery/code/figure-5.txt

6. The file names appearing under each thumbnails may perhaps be replaced with image caption as the first choice. With the hack below, the length of that thumbnail text string will still be relying on the original file name truncating mechanism but the user will gain full control over its appearance. Clean and simple (please, see figure 1 for thumbnail_text CSS class):

http://www.informity.com/gallery/code/figure-6.txt

I hope you will find these hacks and suggestions useful.
Thank you.

Here's one for you, see if you can make a hack that only shows the Albums and Collections Thumbnails as lists without the thumbnails.

Links not working buddy :(