f/2.8

This document is for version 0.4 of the ExZo Plug-In. I keep this page for personal reference.

The Short

If you are already familiar with this and this, jump straight to the download section below.

The Long Story

This WordPress plug-in was build for two specific purposes, that are closely related to this photo-blog. Firstly I wanted to share Exif information provided by my digital camera. (Yes, there are other plug-ins that provide a rudimentary implementation which didn’t quite satisfy my needs!) Secondly I wanted an elegant lightbox-style way of zooming my pictures. Since both purposes were about presenting a photo in my blog, I decided to write one single custom plug-in tailored to meet those demands. So if you want to access more Exif information than the above mentioned plug-ins provide (f.e. the image number supplied by a Nikon D200), read on but prepared for some unix magic.

The Good News

Using these simple tags: [exzo url="" title="" id=""]image.jpg[/exzo]
while running the plug-in will provide this output Here is a complete list of the Exif provided in a sample picture. And if you go ahead an modify the inline-uploading.php appropriately, you wouln’t have to type anything if you use the inline uploading feature of WordPress.

The Good News » What It Does (more details)

You have some options while using this filter. If you supply an url, the image will be linked to that url (all except the magnifying glass at the upper left, which will always enlarge the picture if possible). If no url is supplied (i.e. url=""), the whole image will be linked to the larger image (if available). If there’s no thumbnail file the zoom function will be disabled (you’ll see no loupe) and the whole picture is either linked to the url (if supplied) or static with no interaction.

Further Options: by setting the appropriate values, you can determine whether missing title or Exif will be display or not: $SHOW_EXIF=2;  // 0 = OFF, 1 = ON, IF AVAILABLE, 2 = ALWAYS ON
$SHOW_TITLE=2; // 0 = OFF, 1 = ON, IF AVAILABLE, 2 = ALWAYS ON
You might also want to change these two to suit your needs: $AUTHOR_EMAIL='tmb@vimagic.de';
$AUTHOR_TEXT='tmb@vimagic.de';
Finally, if you use TMB_PERM as url, the picture will be linked to the perma-link of the blog entry.

The Bad News aka Requirements

Due to my lacking php skills I wasn’t able to access the Exif without using the Perl Image::ExifTool module. Which of course means, that if you want this plug-in to work properly, you will need a Perl environment on your webserver (which is probable) and the above mentioned module installed (which is unlikely). Once you have the Perl stuff sorted, you’ll get to the nasty of installing Zend Technologies Perl extension for PHP. This extension allows basic Perl commands in PHP. Please be aware of the first paragraph on Zends page ("Intended Audience"). Ask you friendly admin to help you with any of the above preliminary steps. If you are running a Tenon Server on OSX this might help you.

Setup

Once you are through the above mentioned steps of 1) checking that you have a working Perl environment on your web server 2*) installing the Image::ExifTool module and 3*) installing the Zend Technologies Perl extension for PHP, you can download the plug-in here. Unpack into the appropriate directory, activate and pray to the WordPress Gods, that it won’t delete your whole blog (when was your last backup?) * might require root privileges on you webserver.

Setup » Modifying the inline-uploading.php

If you are using the WordPress web environment to write post and or upload pictures, you might want to modify the wordpress/wp-admin/inline-uploading.php file. See lines 248-255 as well as lines 441-442 of my file (2.0.5 version). Remember two things: 1) always backup before changing file 2) you’ll need to reapply the changes with each version change of WordPress.

Note: beware of the changes in lines 87-100 as well. If you want to modify the image size for your thumnails you can do so here.

License

This WordPress plug is released under the GPL and is provided with absolutely no warranty (as if?). For support leave a comment and we’ll see what the community has to say.

Download

ExZo.zip [28.615 byte]

To-Dos

   » Code Cleaning

Version History

08.jan.2006 v0.4 » first public release

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Coding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.