Looks good, but has some issues

  • The plugin works and looks pretty good. But here are some issues:

    1. The options are a lacking. There are a few, but really they could be condensed into just 3 options.

    2 You can’t use regular galleries, so it’s incompatible with a ton of similar plugins. Would be nice if this added the option to make it a masonry gallery on the media upload frame.

    3. It overrides the column setting which you set when placing a gallery by default. Which seems idiotic. But you can turn it off.

    4. Spacing doesn’t seem to work. Images touch vertically, and have horizontal spacing. Nothing seems to affect it.

    5. All of the default CSS is terrible, riddled with !important tags. Very hacky. To be fair, it’s probably to fight against similarly hacky themes. Still, you can turn it off. But you’ll have to reinvent a lot of styles.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author phoenixMagoo

    (@phoenixmagoo)

    Hey man, first of all thanks for honest review. Let me go through your list and let you know how I think and what I want to do next:

    • The options part should really be similar, but it’s get tough when trying to deal with premium themes that inject jQuery improperly. Especially themes that use lazy load in a totally wrong way. Now when I first started doing this I would advise people to contact their theme authors and ask them to use wp_enqueue_script(), but that didn’t work out too well so I just started making the plugin options more granular.
    • I plan in adding in a mechanism to let people use other galleries. I have had a couple of requests for this. Please understand that I have made a total $20 dollars off this plugin though donations, which is fine, but I just cannot roll out as many updates as I would like.
    • The gallery columns issue was tough to deal with at first, but I found the easiest way of dealing with the columns was just remove them and let Masonry do it’s thing. I would LOVE to get gallery column count working and have responsive thumbnails, but like I said previously, feature updates like this would require a good amount of work. I typically do 1 large release a year and this year it was adding Lazy Load. I picked that feature based on request amount.
    • Not sure why this is happening, I would to look at your site and help you fix the spacing issue.
    • You are 100% right. The CSS that controls the gallery images is a hack. I downloaded the top 15 themes from the WordPress repository and basically got this plugin to work out of the box with those themes. But, you can turn it off and then anyone can do their own CSS. It would be really awesome if the Gallery CSS was more normalized at the core level, but it’s not. I am 100% willing to hear a better solution that will work for both newbies and pros.

      • Once again, thanks for your honest review. I appreciate it. Also, I noticed that you don’t have any plugins in the repository. It sounds like you know what you are talking about, so I invite you to join me as a co-developer on this plugin. LIke I was saying, it’s pretty hard for me to find time to get jMIG really where I want it, but I’ve decided this plugin is basically going to be a marathon and one big update a year is going to be the reality. However, if we team up, then maybe we can roll out the updates much faster.

      Please let me know if you want to help out!

      Thanks again!

    Thread Starter radgh

    (@radgh)

    I’ll add a star for your personal feedback. A lot of the issues you’ve faced make sense. It’s gotta be difficult trying to maintain not just your own plugin, but compatibility with other plugins too.

    I’ve been hesitant to release plugins on www.ads-software.com because I don’t have the time to maintain them. I do work with WordPress a lot (themes and plugins), but it’s all closed source privately contracted stuff.

    I don’t have the time or interest to work on your plugin right now, but maybe in the future when some projects launch. I do appreciate the work you have done, even though it wasn’t the best option for the project I was working on. I’ve given you a small donation to help the development.

    If you want to, I would be interested in chatting about development or maybe contributing in the future when I have some more free time. Add me on skype if you want: radleygh

    Plugin Author phoenixMagoo

    (@phoenixmagoo)

    Thank you for the donation! I really appreciate it.

    If you ever want to help out or have ideas the plugin is managed on github:
    https://github.com/phoenixMag00/jquery-masonry-image-gallery

    Thanks again!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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