Setting up Rokin Gallery 3

 

Table of Contents

Installation
Start screen
Setup the Gallery
Update Gallery
Large Galleries
The subextensions/Addons
Adding it to the site
Solving problems

Updated to version 3.2 

Installation

After downloading the RokinGallery.zip you''ll end up with 4 files. rokin-gallery and pwframwork. The files ending with j10 are suitable for Joomla 1.x and the files ending with j15 are suitable for Joomla 1.5.x. You need to install both pwframework and roking gallery. pwframework contains common packages required to work properly, without it, Rokin Gallery does not work. 

 

Start screen

At the image below, you can see the first screen on the administration end. This screen can be very useful since it tells you if you can use Rokin Gallery. 

The other 2 are required to communicate with google. If Either one is green, you are able to use it. Rokin Gallery determines which one to use. If both are available it uses CURL to communicate. 

 

Setup the gallery

Rokin Gallery has native support for Picasa and for local files, by an extension you can get support for Flickr. The configuration for all galleries however is almost in the same fashion. Ill be describing the most commonly used namely picasa gallery.

Adding a new gallery is easy. Press the configuration tab button on the left of the screen. The addon list screen will be displayed. At the top you'll see a couple of tables and the top most table is like the one below. (screen may vary depending on the number of textensions installed) saying Admin addon's. Click on the Picsaweb Gallery Manager

 

The Picasa Gallery Manager screen appears.  Rokin Gallery supports multiple galleries. Each gallery is defined by a username in picasaweb. You can add edir or remove galleries in this screen as  shown above.

Press the add button and the screen as below is displayed. Just add your username as you are using with picasaweb, fill in the name as you want to display the gallery to the viewers, set ordering and that is basically it. Press Apply and then the Load Gallery button. This will retrieve data from google containing information about your albums en pictures. Please do note that only public albums will be downloaded.  

After a successful data retrieval all your albums will be displayed in the list. With the checkbox you can either enable or disable the album. A disabled album will not be rendered to the viewers. 

 

Update Gallery 

Rokin gallery is not a live feed of your online picture gallery, it only updates if you say it to. Update is simple. Navigate to your gallery and press the load gallery button again. Data will be synced. If you have comments placed for instance by the comment addon don't worry, this data will not be removed unless you removed the picture from your gallery.

 

Large galleries

Some users have large galleries, and I mean large (over 50.000 pics). If you are such heavy user Pressing the Load Gallery button migth cause some time outs and out of memory problems. To overcome this problem Picasa Gallery has a way to do a partial loading mechanism. It goes in step sort of speak. You can do so by pressing the Load Albums button. This will retrieve just the album data, and no picture data. Now to get the picture data you'll notice (after the load album has been pressed and albums are succesfully retrieved). an update button on the right of each album. Press the update button will retrieve the picture data for this album. You can use it to to update the album after you added or removed pictures with the picasaweb backend or via picasa it self.

 

The sub extensions/Addon's

The sub extension are like the joomla modules. Some will be usable among all stages (Gallery, Album, Picture stage), some just at a specific one. This depends on where it was developed for. Sub extensions can be positioned just like modules. The sub extension will be positional within the joomla content area, not the joomla module positions. To help you decide an image is provided showing what is where. Placing a sub extension on a specific position can mess up your viewers page so always test on the front end  to see how it looks. 

 

To enable an extension or subextension just click on the cross/extension icon. If it shows you the red cross it means it is disabled. Clicking on it should change the icon, notifiing you that it is live. If you have installed a new extension always go to the settings by clicking on the name. This will show you a screen like above. Some extensions use this to roundup the installation that may be required. Press save to close the screen and go back, or press apply just to save the changes, so you can tweak the parameters a bit while looking on the frontpage for the result. 

 Rokin Gallery comes with a variety of default plugins, but more are available through the download section. When you downloaded a new extension you can easily install them by clicking on the install tab. Navigate to your newly downloaded extension and click on the install button to upload and install the plugin. 

 

Adding it to the Site

Although this topic belongs to the Joomla documentation I describe it here since it's a frequently asked question.:

So I configured Rokin Galler but it does not appear on my site. How do I add it to my site?

This site sports very nice video tutorials of all kids of Joomla activities. The link below is the one where interested in.

http://www.mambodemo.com/joomla_1.5/add_a_menu_item_-_internal.html

Note: on the list of internal links you should find Rokin Gallery. 

 

Solving Problems

Sometimes I get an email (20 a day or so) saying that Rokin Gallery does not work. But there is no error or warning just a blank screen. Well I had that too on my online site once but not when I test locally. After a while I figured out why this is. Apparently most of the hosting providers turn on a php feature that suppresses warnings and it won't be displayed on your site. This is nice for visitors but it keeps us site administrators in the dark. Anyway here is a way to turn it on in the root of your joomla site there should be a .htaccess file if not just create on. and put the following line in to it save it.

php_flag display_errors on

Now it shows what's wrong. You can turn it off again by removing it again. Hopefully now it shows what's wrong

You can check the forum for solutions that already might be available. If you still have problems you can use the contact form. If you have an issue that needs to be solved quickly you can hire support, use the contact form for more information about that.

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