RocketTheme Blog

Since the launch of RokGallery we had an incredible amount of features requests. Although we couldn't satisfy all of them, we are very happy to announce RokGallery 2.0 which includes many new features as well as bug fixes.

Here I'd like to go through some of the new features:

Gallery Picker Button Extension

Custom thumbnails for Slices

When a Slice is not part of any Gallery, you can now create a customized thumbnail where you can specify width, height, background color and if you want to keep the aspect ratio. Extremely useful if you want to place a thumbnail of a certain size in an Article and you have Slices that don't necessarily needs to be in a Gallery.

You can also globally set defaults for the thumbnails. To do so just go in the Settings and look for "Default Thumbnail Settings".

Slices Navigation from the Slice Editor

Jumping between slices required quite some steps: Edit a Slice, Close the Slice Editor, Navigate to the previous/next Slice, Edit the Slice. Well, now this is much easier and faster. We have integrated a navigation for the Slices right into the Slice Editor itself, at the bottom right, without the need of leaving the panel.

NOTE: Please note that this applies only for the Edit action. The New Slice action won't show the navigation at all.

Manual and Random Ordering

Every gallery can now be sorted randomly or manually. Both apply to RokGallery Module (both Grid and Slideshow layouts) and to the Menu Item. You will notice the two new entries in the "Default Sort by" parameter.

For the Manual Ordering, we wanted to provide an easy way to handle the ordering and what's better than Drag & Drop? In the Advanced Options of the Gallery Manager you'll find a new button "Ordering" that will bring up a panel with miniatures of your Gallery. Just drag and drop to reorder until you are happy with it and by Applying or Saving you are good to go.

Note: To use the manual ordering, you'll have to change the "Default Sort by" parameter for the Module or Menu Item in order to use your custom ordering.

Also note that in the case of Random ordering with a Menu Item, if the Menu Item has the advanced parameter set to "Show Sorting Options", this will nullify the Random ordering, because the sorting functionality will be handed to the user interaction.

Slices Link with Article Picker

Having to manually link a Slice to a specific Joomla! article is now extremely easy to achieve thanks to the new integrated Article Picker. Next to the Link field in the Slice Editor you will notice a new chain icon which will bring up the Article Picker popup. The link field is more advanced now, in fact behind the scenes this is no longer saved as a simple text link but instead it stores the data in a JSON format which gives us an extremely dynamic logic for the type of data we want to support for a link. In this version we are introducing the Article picker but thank to the new logic put for the link, we are planning to extend it to have even more choices other than just custom links and Articles.

Load All and Select All

RokGallery 2.0 includes two new very handy functionalities: Load All and Select All. By now you should be very familiar with the "Load More" button. In this new version we have extended it to capture when the "SHIFT" key has been pressed and turn the "Load More" into a "Load All" that, when clicked, will load every file in one single go.

The Select All is located where all the informations about the selection, displayed and total files count is located. When clicked it will auto-select every file in the current view.

The combination of Load All and Select All is extremely useful especially when in conjuction with filters applied.

Gallery Details Navigation

We have implemented a "Previous" and "Next" navigation in the details view of a Gallery in the frontend, as well as a "Back to the Gallery" link.

Conclusion

We hope you will enjoy this new version of RokGallery and we want to thank you all for the incredible amount of feedbacks that have provided. RokGallery has been and continues to be a very ambitious and revolutionary Extension that we are very proud of and will continue to improve.