Today we’re excited to announce that the SlidePress plugin for WordPress – originally developed by Palms Development Company – has been acquired by SlideShowPro / Dominey Design Inc and is now part of the SlideShowPro family of products as a free accessory for SlideShowPro Standalone.
For many months now, SlidePress has proven to be a valuable utility for many SlideShowPro users who use WordPress as their web site publishing software. The plugin not only provides an easy way to embed SWFs, but also a complete user interface for creating customized slideshows and photo galleries using SlideShowPro as the media player.
SlidePress will continue to be updated and maintained as a free WordPress plugin. By bringing the plugin in-house, updates to it (as well as SlideShowPro itself) will be developed in-tandem for more synchronized public releases as well as deeper product integration going forward.
A new build of SlidePress has been posted today to the WordPress Plugins Directory that contains revised documentation as well as a handful of small improvements and updates. We’ve also re-launched the SlidePress site (domain changes have not fully propagated yet), and have migrated plugin documentation over to our support wiki.
Expect to see SlidePress expanded and improved in the months ahead. Thanks to Scott Shelton of Palms for not only creating SlidePress, but for all his assistance during this transition.
Top 10 user examples for September 2009
Every day, users of our products share their creations with us. From those submissions we pick the ten most creative, beautiful, and/or unique examples and include them in our monthly newsletter. Whichever site from those 10 stands out just a little more is crowned “Site of the Month”, which not only gives the winning user bragging rights, but also awards them with a free SlideShowPro t-shirt as our small way of saying ‘thank you’ for making us look so good.
SITE OF THE MONTH:
Joel Cudmore
http://www.joelcudmore.com/
Joel Cudmore’s photography portfolio site is superbly executed from top to bottom. The layout is easy on the eyes, minimal, and serves as the perfect backdrop for his collection of still-life, architectural, and creative photography. Joel uses SlideShowPro for Flash, SlideShowPro ThumbGrid, and SlideShowPro Director as his content publishing / management source. The home page is especially unique, for Joel is using SlideShowPro Director’s new Smart Album functionality to populate the display with content tagged “home-page,” giving him freedom to dynamically change content anytime. Not only that, but he’s using ThumbGrid as the interface (with SlideShowPro unseen off the stage), with some custom ActionScript that detects thumb clicks, reads the album/content ID from the chosen content, then redirects the browser using a SlideShowPro permalink. Clever, and beautiful. Great work Joel!
THE REMAINING TOP 9 (ALL FANTASTIC – DIVE IN!):
http://www.tim-barber.com/
http://www.teddymaki.com/
http://www.hatcherydesign.com/work.php
http://www.adstudio.be/
http://www.arossphoto.com/
http://www.tony-hart.com/
http://www.megelaine.com/
http://hofferphotography.com/
http://DigitalFusion.net/
Note: To respect the privacy of our users, only those sites shared directly with us are considered and included. If you’d like us to consider your site for next month, please submit your site by sending an email or posting to the Show & Tell Forum.
Latest Director beta includes group reordering
In case you missed it, Director 1.4 is currently available as a beta release and includes some great stuff. Get caught up on the original announcement here.
We’ve just released a new build (Build 3400) of the beta that includes one of the most requested features we hear from Director users: the ability to reorder multiple items within an album. In the past, you could only reorder a single image/video at a time, making it quite difficult to manage content order within large albums. In this new build, you can use the existing multiple-selection functionality in Director to select a range of images, then drag and drop them as a group to a new location in the album. For those who need visual proof, check out the example video below.
Remember, Director 1.4 is still in the beta phase, so it may be unstable or even unusable on some setups. If you are testing, please give us your feedback on all the new features over in the beta forum.
SlideShowPro Director 1.4 beta now available
A few weeks back, we gave a sneak peek at a few of the things we were working on for SlideShowPro Director 1.4. Today, I’m happy to report that those new features (and a few more goodies) are available in the form of a beta release.
Before we get to the good stuff, we should cover the standard disclaimer regarding beta software. You should not use this release on anything that is in production, as we cannot guarantee that it will work properly, or that it will work at all. If you do choose to use the beta, please make the appropriate backups of both the Director folder and the database before continuing.
So what’s new in 1.4? Here’s a rundown:
Auto-updating
If you’ve ever had to manage several Director installs, you know the pain that can be associated with keeping them all up to date. That’s why Director 1.4 features a built in auto-update system. While you will still need to upgrade all your installs to 1.4 the old way, once they are running 1.4 all further updates will be handled in Director itself, all you have to do is click a button.
Simplified install
In addition to making application updates easier, we’ve also made the initial installation process simpler. Installation will now consist of a single file you upload to your server. You then load the file in your web browser, enter your server information, and presto‚ all the requisite files for SlideShowPro Director will be downloaded from our server to yours with all the correct file permissions and settings you need to get going. This system will ensure fewer installation errors and make the installation process easier for non-web developers.
Generated video previews and thumbnails
In the previous point update to SlideShowPro Director, we enhanced videos by giving users the ability to assign separate images for video previews and thumbnails. Director 1.4 will take this functionality a step further by generating images from your uploaded videos. Simply upload a video, and SlideShowPro Director will automatically assign a still image. To use a different image from a video, pop-open the edit window to choose a different frame. For users who prefer creating their own video previews and thumbnails, nothing has changed. You can still assign your own images should you not want to use an image generated by Director.
Note: This functionality will require a server with the ffmpeg library installed. Director 1.4 will automatically find the library for you (if available). If you’re unsure whether your server currently supports ffmpeg, you may want to contact your web host.
Smart galleries
In Director 1.3, we introduced smart albums, which allowed you to group content from other albums based on tags, date and other information. In Director 1.4, we’ve extended Director’s built-in intelligence to allow for smart galleries. They work much like smart albums do, as you can add tags to albums and use those tags to form smart galleries. You can also use the date the album was created or last modified as a rule to further filter the included albums.
Rebuilt manage albums interface
Last but certainly not least, we have reworked a portion of Director that has needed some updating for quite some time. The manage albums screen, which is used to select which albums are included/excluded from a custom gallery, worked fine as long as you didn’t have too many albums. If you had a larger install, however, the screen slowed down and in some cases was not usable. We’ve now separated out the functionality, showing only the albums currently in the gallery by default. To add albums, you simply click the “Add albums” button, and any available albums are shown in a popup dialogue. The listing is paginated and can also be searched, so it should work well whether you have 5 albums or 500.
We’ve spent the last few weeks chasing down bugs, touching up Director’s interface and trying to squeeze as much performance as we can from this new release. Now, we need your feedback on how we’ve done. To download the beta, go to the Director product page and scroll down to the section marked “BETA RELEASE”. There you will see links to either download a new install or upgrade an existing install. We’re particularly interested in hearing reports on how the simplified install process works, and to that end we are offering a free activation key that anyone can use to install 1.4 during the beta phase (the key will expire once a final version of 1.4 is released). The free beta key is:
one-four-beta
As always, we appreciate your help kicking the tires of this new release. Let us know what you think in our dedicated beta forum. Happy testing!
We receive a lot of email from SlideShowPro customers looking for web design / development assistance with their projects (many of which involve customizing SlideShowPro in some fashion), so we’ve added a “Jobs” category to our community forums so that clients can find developers, and vice versa. Dive in.
This isn’t exactly news for existing users, but news nonetheless. Historically, our desktop products — including SlideShowPro for Flash, SlideShowPro for Lightroom and SlideShowPro ThumbGrid — have been sold as “single user” products where the licensee is the user. Based on feedback from our corporate customers, we’re now offering “Corporate” licenses for all of the above products. With these licenses, the licensee is the business entity, and allows licensees to manage themselves which employees receive and use products that are purchased. For more information, see our licensing page or contact us.
Director 1.3.9 fixes serious security issue
Thanks to the helpful folks at Clear Skies Security, we’ve found and fixed a serious security issue in SlideShowPro Director. The following versions of SlideShowPro Director are affected:
SlideShowPro Director 1.1.x
SlideShowPro Director 1.2.x
SlideShowPro Director 1.3.x
If you are running any of the above versions, we recommend you upgrade immediately to SlideShowPro Director 1.3.9, now available in the Account Center.
This issue does not affect SlideShowPro Director Hosting customers, as always your installs have been automatically upgraded to the latest version.
We’ve released Director 1.3.8 to squash a few bugs that popped up in the recently released 1.3.7. Most of the issues revolved around the new “Download original image” link template, but this release also fixes a problem that surfaced in 1.3.7 that would prevent you from deleting albums.
SlideShowPro Director 1.3.7, DirectorPHP 1.1.5 released
Hot off the press are two maintenance releases for SlideShowPro Director (1.3.7) and the DirectorPHP class (1.1.5).
Director 1.3.7 is mostly a bug-fix release, but does include a few additions. Most notably, we now include a “Download original image” link template and we’ve changed our uploader so that it recognizes IPTC keywords and automatically adds them as tags. For a list of all the changes in this releases, have a peek at the version history.
You can download the Director update by logging into your account center profile and the DirectorPHP update is available on the Director extras page.
If you are using the SlideShowPro Director hosting service at slideshowpro.com, your installs are already running 1.3.7, so enjoy!
Google now indexing external Flash content
Google has been indexing text found inside SWF files for a while now, but on Thursday they announced that they’ve added external content as part of their Flash indexing system. What exactly does that mean? It means that Google can now “see” the XML file that SlideShowPro loads and index any image links contained therein. When indexed, the images are associated with the SWF and HTML document embedding them so click-throughs would lead users to your slideshow.
Now, it’s worth pointing out that this is brand new, and we’ve yet to test their claim, but it’s an exciting development for anyone who would like their slideshow content to be discoverable by search engines. If you’d rather not let Google index your content, you can add a directive to your robots.txt file to block it.
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