I know it’s just a week since I released the previous version of YouTube SimpleGallery, but feedback and suggestions keep pouring in from the users. And I think some of them are so good, I have to implement them immediately – and when they work out, I just can’t wait to release a new version. Sorry! So here it is; YouTube SimpleGallery 1.5 with a small batch of user requested features.

New features in this version include:

• Option for thumbnail size: using the largest thumbnail available from YouTube (480×360), users can now define the desired width of the thumbnails on the Settings Page.
• Option for columns: Defining the number of thumbs that fits in one row within their current theme, users can define the numbers of thumbs per row. Rows will be broken with clear: both; avoiding broken galleries due to long titles, etc. The number of columns can also be defined for each gallery, using [youtubegallery cols=x], overriding the default settings.
• Style option for titles: Users can now define, from the Settings Page, their own CSS styles for the titles.

Again I owe a debt of gratitude to the user base, who provide invaluable feedback and suggestions, helping me develop YouTube SimpleGallery further and further, and (hopefully) continually making it better. Thank you all! Keep the feedback coming!

To celebrate the release of WordPress 3.1 I’ve just released version 1.4 of YouTube SimpleGallery. Where the previous update dealt mostly with fixing bugs, this new version boasts a lot of new features – not the least among them: Widgets!

New features include:

• Added support for Widgets – just go to Appearance > Widgets and add as many galleries to your Sidebar as you want
• Added support for Fancybox (use Fancybox for WordPress)
• Added option to autoplay videos on click
• Embedding is now HTML5 compliant for all Gallery Effects.
• Detailed description of Usage and FAQ on Settings Page.

Most of these new features are requests/suggestions from users – hope you enjoy! I’ve tried to test this version on several WP-installs, on both Mac and Windows, and in several browsers. Still, there might be bugs, so please don’t hesitate to leave feedback and bug reports, either here on in the WP forums.

I’ve just released v1.3 of the YouTube SimpleGallery. The new release is mainly bugfixes; both pertaining to changes in the way WordPress auto-embeds media-URLs and to how YouTube has changed it’s embedding-form (from object to iFrame). Hopefully this will eliminate broken thumbnails and blank Thickboxes which several users have reported in the last weeks.

I’ve also added an option for HD-video; you can thick a checkbox on the Settings-page, and the gallery will use the HD-version of the video wherever it’s available.

That’s all for now. Go update your YouTube SimpleGallery to the latest version …

Just a quick note to let you know I’ve updated both YouTube SimpleGallery and Vimeo SimpleGallery, as well as a little bugfix on WP Global Screen Options.

New option in the plugs

Both video gallery plugins now have an added option, which let’s you define if links should be opened in new windows/tabs when going directly to YouTube.com or Vimeo.com. I also changed the Vimeo plug slightly, to use an embedding that is more friendly to non-Flash devices like iPhone/iPad/etc.

The changes in Global Screen Options is minor, mostly just bugfixes.

Here, have another plugin! I’ve just released Vimeo SimpleGallery, which is pretty much the little brother of YouTube SimpleGallery. It’s basically the YouTube SimpleGallery-plugin rewritten to eat Vimeo-URIs, instead of YouTube-URIs, and spit out a gallery.

If you’re familiar with YouTube SimpleGallery this one won’t seem different at all. They both work the same way, with pretty much the same options. The only difference is that the Vimeo-version can fetch video size and titles from Vimeo automatically, as with the YouTube-version you had to define both manually.

Here’s how it works:

Add the following code:

[vimeogallery]
http://vimeo.com/14815990
http://vimeo.com/13470805
http://vimeo.com/14844291
http://vimeo.com/14736551
[/vimeogallery]


And you get:

The Solo Adventures 2D

Brad Laner - Eyes Close

Umbra (HD - 2010)

ZEROING

Getting annoyed with the «Comments are closed»-message on Posts and Pages where you have shut off the comment option? It’s easy to remove. Here’s how:

Edit the relevant file(s) in your theme, usually single.php and page.php.

Find:

<?php comments_template(); ?>

And replace with:

<?php if('closed' != $post->comment_status) comments_template(); ?>

That’s it – «Comments are closed» is history.

I’ve just released a new WP-plugin: WP Global Screen Options. It’s a simple little plug that lets Administrators set global «Screen Options» for all users of a WP-site (both existing and new ones) when adding/editing Posts and Pages and/or on the Dashboard – with an option to hide the «Screen Options»-tab if necessary.

The plugin came about as I increasingly saw a need to define screen options for users on sites I’m developing; very often I want to hide redundant meta boxes to reduce the clutter in Post- and Page-admin. It’s a time-consuming pain to do it manually for each and every user, so I whipped up a script that does this globally.

The plugin has been approved by WordPress.org and can be found in the Plugin Directory.

Wow! It’s been seven months since the last update of the YouTube SimpleGallery plugin. A lot has happened since then, not the least the release of WordPress 3.0. Since its first release in December 2009 the plug has been downloaded almost 3.500 times! Lately I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails with bugs – and I really appreciate that, keep it up! – especially about broken thumbnails, and sometimes about problems with Thickbox.

I’ve tried to eliminate all these bugs in this latest version, and hopefully I’ve been able to do that. But YouTube is huge, and I can’t test every video on it with my plug, so feedback from its users are invaluable.

Also, I’ve added an option to use Shadowbox JS instead of Thickbox. This seems like a smart move since development of Thickbox has been discontinued (the Thickbox option is kept, though, for backwards compatibility). Personally I like Shadowbox a lot better than Thickbox, especially when using titles. I hope Shadowbox will work better (e.g. in terms of conflict with other plugins), and that YouTube SimpleGallery has been ever better!

Oh yeah, I’ve also decided to move it out of beta, since I now feel confident it’s a working and usable plugin. So head over and download it, or go to your WP-Dashboard and upgrade it!  As always, any feedback is appreciated!

Ever had parallel boxes on a website you’re developing, and wanted them to have the same height, but still wanting them to have dynamic height, i.e. not having to lock them to a certain height in the CSS? I certainly have, and it’s usually difficult. But jQuery provides a simple sollution!

Say this is our starting point:

Two boxes, with different content, and thus different height. These two can quite easilly be made to have the same height, with a bit of jQuery magic. We start out by identifying them, adding a unique ID for each box. In this example I’ve simply called them #box1 and #box 2:

Then I utilize the following script, which will measure both boxes, find the one that is highest, and then apply that height to the shorter one:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(document).ready(function($){

	box1height = $('#box1').height();
	box2height = $('#box2').height();
	if(box1height>box2height){
	$('#box2').css('height', box1height);
	}
	else {
	$('#box1').css('height', box2height);
	}
});
</script>

The result will be this:

Easy as that!

I often use jQuery in the Themes and, without exception, in all the Plugins I write. You can easilly add jQuery to any HTML-document by simply linking to Googles jQuery-script, but this is not always without problems, especially if your sites employs several libraries.

jQuery is often added with this line between and <head> and </head>:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.js"</script>

But this can – among other things – cause latency in page loading, and is really not necessary as WordPress comes pre-packed with a lot of script-libraries, including jQuery.

To add jQuery (or Script-A-Licious or ProtoType) to your Theme, you simply use the wp_enqueue_script() function. In your Themes functions.php (if it doesn’t exists, simply create it) you add these lines:

<?php
function yourtheme_init(){
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
 wp_enqueue_script('jquery-ui-core');
}
add_filter('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'yourtheme_init');
?>

This will load jQuery on your site’s frontend. If you have plugins that use jQuery, the upshot of this method is that WP will not load jQuery multiple times (as it will if you add it manually to your Theme), and thus not cause conflicts.

To avoid jQuery conflicts you should also surround your scripts with this:

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(document).ready(function($){

YOUR SCRIPT HERE

});
</script>