The Turning Gate

Adobe Lightroom Web Engines, Tutorials and Resources

TTG Highslide Gallery and Pro 1.5 released

by theturninggate on August 19, 2009

Five is a special number. It’s half of ten. We have five fingers on each hand and foot. As a child, we learn to count by fives. Most currencies use it as a monetary denomination for both coin and paper bills. FIVE!!

And so I wanted to make TTG Highslide Gallery Pro 1.FIVE a very special update. By user request, welcome FoxyCart to the party as a third shopping cart option. FoxyCart and PayPal share the product array, making is easy and painless to switch between the two if necessary. Of course, you’ll need a FoxyCart account to make use of the feature. See the FoxyCart site for details on all that.

Meanwhile, the selection gallery benefits from the implementation of JQuery. Checkbox replace looks the same, but is now based on JQuery instead of Mootools. I’m implemented an elastic textarea for the comments input, and my good friend Ben has contributed a JQuery counter that reports the number of ‘checked’ images back to the user.

Round corners for all box elements are in for those browsers that support them in CSS3. They can be used to give your gallery more of a slide transparency feel, or just to take the edge off. Round corners are, of course, optional.

In Slideshow and Proofing modes, caption alignment can now be set to justify, left, right or center. And in Slideshow mode, the Actual Size (1:1) button can now be disappeared.

And I’ve finally nailed down and killed some Fotomoto CSS conflicts that caused items in the Fotomoto cart to become invisible if certain gallery elements were set to the color white. Now a non-issue.

Minor fixes and UI adjustments round out the update. The standard TTG Highslide Gallery benefits from all these improvements, minus the shopping cart stuff.

I haven’t produced updated sample galleries yet, but will do so in coming days. The full list of changes for TTG Highslide Gallery Pro is below.

v1.5 (2009-08-19)
FoxyCart shopping cart integration.
Slideshow mode: Actual Size (1:1) button can now be disabled.
Slideshow mode: Architectural changes made to slideshow buttons to allow Actual Size button removal.
Slideshow and Proofing modes: Option to set caption alignment justify, left, right or center.
Fixed some Fotomoto CSS conflicts.
Round corner options for on-page box elements; only shows in web browsers supporting CSS3 corners.
Replaced Mootools Javascript library with JQuery.
New JQuery checkbox replacement for selection galleries.
New JQuery checkbox counter, for tallying and displaying the number of images “checked” in a selection gallery.
New JQuery elastic textarea for selection gallery comments form.
Fixed some validation errors that crept in during updates.
Minor UI adjustments.

As with all updates, some things have been shifted around or adjusted. I’ve tried to test the gallery with various setups and have passed it. But if you find something that doesn’t work the way you think it’s supposed to, do let me know. This has been a pretty intensive update for me, and it’s possible I may have missed something.

{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

Ted Kaiser August 20, 2009 at 1:19 pm

Hey Matthew,

Thanks for your hard work on this and your many other projects – they’re great products! Just wondering, any plans for Wordpress integration? Do you know of any 3rd party Wordpress integration products that could apply?

Thanks again!

Reply

theturninggate August 20, 2009 at 5:46 pm

Somewhere in the back of my mind the idea of Wordpress integration has come up, but I have yet to give it any serious thought. I’m busy enough as it is. No idea what’s out there for Wordpress options.

Reply

Dave Griffin August 21, 2009 at 10:43 am

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for a great LR plugin! I have a suggestion for the Paypal integration (I wanted to do quantity discounts, but that’s turning out to be a nightmare with the Paypal API…) What I do want to offer is digital downloads, which by their nature don’t have shipping charges. It also seems that shipping charges often vary by the size of the print as well, so modifying the array to have price and shipping as separate but coupled variables would be useful (look for comma-separated values?). However, I would be more than happy just to have a field that lets me substitute the CalculateOrder javascript. What I’ll end up doing for now is writing a post-processing script that tweaks that procedure to have custom shipping charges — you’ve already done the heavy lifting so it’ll be pretty simple to automate externally.

Reply

Dave Griffin August 21, 2009 at 12:14 pm

Getting closer… A tax_rate variable setting would also be handy for PayPal. (Again, I took care of this with a simple post-processing script.) For your consideration.

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