Difficult to order slides

Hi TonyR63, thank you for your review.

Did you ask for support in the forum here? I am sure someone including Stefan Boonstra would be keen to help you. It sounds like you have a conflict with either the theme or a plugin.

Many users here have reported good reviews about this great plugin.

Perhaps you can share more about your issue with us. I am sure someone will be able to help you.

Kind regards

Thanks for your suggestions.

I host my own WordPress LAMP environment and I was updating content to a Web server on the same sub net. I would have contacted support had I remembered to capture the cryptic screen that was displayed without warning when I was updating the 2nd last slide in a 117 slide set. I have been using the slideshow plugin for more than 8 months with the same Mantra Theme and had only one other crash however it did not show the unusual screen I saw last night. The main WordPress editing interface occasionally falls off the perch however when you recover you only have to go back a few words but in the case of the Slideshow I lost all 70 minutes of manual editing having to start from scratch. This would be the greatest data loss I’ve had for many years that could not be accounted for by a power cut or hardware failure. Applications simply should not dump you out without any recovery option.

I have researched and learned about the excellent WordPress template hierarchy and practiced PHP scripting alterations of the Twenty Ten Theme on a sandbox environment and I do not understand what would cause this plugin to crash citing loss of connectivity to the server when I was just editing text in a form on the browser. Why would it be writing back to the server and why is it not hooking into the existing WordPress autosave functionality? I’m surprised that no one else has encountered this issue as it obviously does not autosave. o I will take a backup snapshot of my site and upgrade all components to the most recent release. I will test alternative slideshow options to see how they go before i commit to further content additions involving large numbers of pictures.

Hi,

I’m terribly sorry to hear about the enormous loss of work the slideshow plugin has cost you.

Altough I realise this will not help you get your slideshow back, I have added the autosave feature to the project board to implement for slideshow version 2.3.0.

Do you have any suggestions regarding improvements on the ordering of slides?

Again, I’m very sorry.

Best regards,
Stefan

Hello Stefan

Sorry for the delay getting back to you and thank you for taking the time to respond. Delighted to hear you have implemented the auto save feature and hopefully it will be approved and perhaps benefit other users. I will send a further donation to help keep you guys going.

Concerning improvement in ordering of slides here are some suggestions.

1. Could there be a Sort function where users are asked it they would like slides ordered according to their existing alphabetical name or numerical order in the file names the way a folder would order inserted after selecting images for import? Could option be existing folder list order or prompt for ascending or descending or other variable?

2. I think I once put a number in the image file name in the source folder trying to force an order but found when I had imported they ended up the exact opposite to what I wanted. Could there be a button to just exactly reverse order to resolve such an occurrence?

3. Another possible feature would be to have an option to select “Reduce to story board line” where the interface switches to a small image slide strip horizontally left to right where you can drag images around that includes a zoom feature in case you cannot tell some images apart. I guess you need to think of ways of helping order before import and how to help adjust order after import if the order ends up not as expected.

4. A default of the description text duplicating the image name text might help start to fill out some of the text that people might want to put in description field rather than starting with a blank entry every time-could be another idea to take some of the labour out of the process.

5. Another possible future feature is to have your plugin pick up tag data from the image files.

I think if you can have some image ordering features your plugin will stand out because image order is very important in most cases.

I hope some of what I suggested will make some sense and might trigger other ideas within your team.

Kind Regards

TonyR

Hi TonyR,

Thank you very much for your great suggestions.

I especially like the idea of having a zoom function on the slides grid layout. The grid would fit in really well, as the settings will be moved to a different page. Like the custom stylesheets.

I have added a card with a list of the features you have suggested to be added in version 2.3.0. You can view it here.

Also, I haven’t actually implemented the auto save functionality yet. It’s registered as a “to do” for version 2.3.0 as well. You can find the auto save card here.

Thanks again!

Best regards,
Stefan