MONTAGE 2 Gallery & Lightbox

RapidWeaver Classic Stacks
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I continue to look for an image gallery stack with a built-in light-box. Doobox’s MONTAGE 2 may fit my needs. I want a stack that creates a thumbnail from the larger image so I don’t need to do that work, and I want a stack that in RW EDIT mode condenses all the images into a manageable format, and MONTAGE 2 looks like it does that. I need the ability to add a thin color border around each image to separate it from the page’s white background.

As of today (12.21.15) my page is using Stacks4Stacks ProGallery stack, and that works good for my needs with 2 exceptions. It’s unknown if and when the stack will be released as alpha and therefore remove the beta notice, and for my needs its RW edit mode is a bit cumbersome since the images appear nearly full size, and when there are a lot of images the edit page length gets super long. There is a way to shrink the edit mode images, but that’s more work then I want to do.

Have you used MONTAGE 2? If so please post links to examples of it in use. Thanks

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@bruce I also hope ProGallery gets out of alpha/beta soon so we can buy and so that notice is removed.

However … a very efficient use of ProGallery is to use it’s ability to read from a warehoused folder. Just put all your images in that folder. You can even delete/add images and they will automatically be deleted/added to the gallery. It’s a very nice feature of the stack and will save you tons of work and headache relative to the drag/drop approach.

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@Mathew, Thanks for the heads up on the warehoused solution. I’ll give that a try.

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@Mathew, I having trouble figuring out how to make the warehoused folder work, and I could use some guidance. Here’s what I did:

  1. I placed my images into a folder inside my public_html folder where my site files are. I used Fetch to do that.
  2. I added an Image Directory instance into the ProGallery stack.
  3. I changed the name of the RW page to end with .php.
  4. I made the settings look like this , but I see no images.
1 Like
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I gave up on the other warehoused solution a year ago. I’m sure it was user-error, but the developer never got back to me (I think he’s out of business now…I hope all is okay with him). I , like you, could not get the folder-implementation to work.

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Did you delete the index.html from every page that is now a php page?

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I did what the instructions said to do… I think! They say to

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I expect you have an index.html file on your server which will need to be deleted using an FTP program. Consider this a feature of Rapidweaver.

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I deleted the index.html file, but I still have something wrong. It says…

UPDATE! Hold for a bit. Will has updated the ProGallery Beta and I see more info about setting this up. I will work on it more.

I got it working!!!

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@bruce I’m glad you got this working! I was traveling all day yesterday so could not respond. It’s easy to input the correct folder once you know the “trick” that Will uses relative folders rather than an absolute path. This wasn’t clear to me either and I’m glad his new set of instructions make this all clear.

I also just found out I can buy ProGallery. Instant buy. That takes care of the beta notice text. In addition the stack seems to now load images at my test page about twice as fast, maybe faster. Very sweet.

At any rate, I hope this stack meets your needs. There’s a number of settings to explore.