Gallery stacks, Armadillo Blogs and more

Classic General
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Some of you may remember a question a few weeks back, about creating galleries in Blog posts? Those with longer memories may remember that I wrote a review of the then newly arrived Gallery 3 from Instacks…?

Firstly let me say that many of the developers I have contacted and purchased from are superb, responsive and helpful. Some thought go the extra mile. Jannis from Instacks is one of the latter. He created Gallery 3 and from the off he responded to questions, added features. A big one for many photographers is a download button - I do not want anyone downloading my imges, they are my living. I suggested this to Jannis and he sent me a version to test, without a download button, within two hours.

Moving forward a year or so, and I asked here about galleries in Armadillo. Jon has promised them for a while, but with no signs of movement I started looking at PulseCMS, TotalCMS and more.

Here is the crux of it - I got an email from Jannis at Instacks saying “Try this please” - an update to Gallery 3 stack

Hey Presto! A gallery for Armadillo!!

Adding it is very straightforward

iPhone image on 2016-11-03 at 23_48_57.png1681×1024 184 KB

and the results are exactly what I need: Armadillo Gallery

Available now to all Gallery 3 users via update.

Yes, I am very biased, but I strongly believe in giving a big shout-out to people like Jannis Rondorf who go beyond to help their users and customers to do extraordinary things.

Thank You Jannis!!!

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@NickWB That’s great news! I’ve been super happy with ProGallery (Will Woodgate) for regular pages, but I may now get this product for integration with Armadillo.

Can one use warehoused images? i.e. images I already have uploaded to my host but not already inside Armadillo or RW?

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Hi Matthew,

I am so delighted. The stack was literally updated last night and this morning, so no warehoused images yet. I am simply dragging and dropping images into the blog post as jpegs (2500px for the images you see). I am amazed how helpful Jannis has been, so I’m sure a suggestion of enabling image warehousing would be looked at carefully.

Will is another great and super helpful developer with great products

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Jannis @instacks definately goes above and beyond. He even let you take some photos of his summer cottage I see :grin: Beautiful work!

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That looks very useful.

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@Scott Thanks for the kind comment!

I hope no-one minds such overt praise? I cannot think of a better way of recommending people who have made such a big effort to be helpful; this is not just business, but real kindness and I have been fortunate to see it from a few developers and users here. The guy who ranted about ‘Poor impression’ really does not now what he has missed.

For anyone thinking of applying this stack to their Armadillo project, here is the setup I have actually used for my site linked above:

Galery_Stack.png922×696 76.6 KB

The grid and the Lightbox were both set to ‘Fill’

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed the Armadillo menu stack below - I cannot get any help from Armadillo’s developer, so has anyone a clue on how to get menus to show on the armadillo page? The stack is correctly configured, but not joy on menus at all: http://www.nickwb.com/news/

A client has picked up the menu thing and until it is sorted, I’ll not get a big site to do for them :frowning:

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Wow, Just WOW! Thanks for this forum thread mate. I have been wanting something like that for about a year! This probably means that Armadillo will be my nr 1 CMS Stack of course with integration with Gallery 3. Awesome news! You made my day. Even my weekend. If not the month!
Many thanks to Janis @instacks for the update! I’m so happy! My English is not good enough to describe how grateful I am for this integration. Thank you guys once again!

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Yes @koles … @instacks is rather rad :slight_smile:

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oo fabulous, I was wondering about galleries in Armadillo thanks very much for the info :slight_smile:

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@NickWB Something is amiss here. Are you trying to show categories, tags, and such? If so then you want the Armadillo Blog Navigation stack. And you may not have it placed in the best place: as shown your blog tags/categories will display under all the blog posts. That’s usually not so helpful. I create a 2-column page where one column is for the blog content and the other is for the blog navigation (or sidebar) content.

… but maybe I’m misunderstanding and you really do want the Armadillo Menu stack: I just can’t see why in this case.

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Hi Mathew - thanks for the input. No, the blog navigation stack does not play well with galleries at this moment. I was using it, but it needs some refinement so it is possible show what is needed, ie just categories or keywords, but not dates.

Jon at Armadillo has been incredibly helpful in coming back to me, explaining why navigation (Armadillo menu) is not working “there being different versions of jQuery on the page. While Armadillo is proactive about isolating its scripts to prevent conflicts the other stack is not” I’m talking to the other (very helpful) developer now.

At this moment, everything is very new and needs a shakedown, but it is looking very promising!

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Hi @NickWB, It does look promising, indeed. After reading your post I had to give it a try, so this afternoon I’ve been playing around with the Armadillo Blog Gallery Integration on the latest update of Gallery 3. On a test blog I created I could get the Armadillo Blog Navigation to work/look fine (I think) as long as there were 2 or more entries for any category, tag or archive link to follow. If there was only one entry, then the resulting page wouldn’t look as I had intended - a post summary with an image would be displayed below as if it was part of a gallery. With two or more it displayed properly. I am using Foundry for my website. I haven’t been using post summary on my actual blog, so I’d need to start doing that to use the gallery integration.

Here is my test blog if you are interested:
http://www.whiteonline.ca/development/blogtest2/
the only tag with a single entry is “london” to show how it displays in that situation:
http://www.whiteonline.ca/development/blogtest2/?tag=london
any of the other category/tags return a page as expected.
I did set Armadillo to hide the archive on the test blog to not display in the Armadillo navigation.

Great photos on your website!

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Thanks @GaryW17 interesting - love the British cars on there too!

Yes, all seems to be working OK. I have solved my menu problem - Charlie from Blueball was really helpful and gave me some custom CSS + updates to my Freestack R Nav menus which allowed the menu to work (another great RW developer!)

In terms of the Armadillo menus, I believe that my ‘unorthodox’ use of the mobile menu as a stylistic choice is what is stopping them from working correctly. I have used Freestack and now the Responsive version for several years and adore the unlimited flexibility.

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Yeah, that is a known limitation. But I guess most of the users will have more than one blog post :grimacing:

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@yuzool I try my best :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Displaying photos inside Armadillo pages is also supported.

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@NickWB Did we get all your questions answered? Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with.

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You certainly did Jonathan, thank you. Full marks for a rapid and comprehensive reply :wink:

One quick thought: having rebuilt my blog over the last few hours (long story, don’t ask about third party js) I haver spent hours setting up summaries for the blog post, I’m having to copy and paste all sort of arcane html to get images to display sensible size without having two versions of each.
Is there any really easy way to set image size in the previews of a post to a set percentage? For instance 50% of available width. My manual way of doing it is very effective, but incredibly slow and labour intensive http://www.nickwb.com/news/

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Summaries for posts use the same markup as regular posts, which unfortunately means they can’t be uniquely targeted to resize such images without also affecting the “regular” images for a post displayed in its entirety. My assumption here is that you want the regular post images displayed full size as opposed 50% available width?

I can certainly see the usefulness of such a feature, so I’ve got this on my to-do list now.

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I see that adding the stack is straight forward, but I see no way to add images to the gallery. Can you enlighten on those steps too?