The eagerly awaited version 3.1 of vSlider is at last ready and available for download. As usual, you have both the WP version and the companion G2 theme. Get them from the usual place, in the Cool Stuff section.

So, what’s new? The single biggest change is the new “pre-rendering” feature for the rounded corners. If you recall, the main driver for creating version 3 was the ability to have configurable colors and sizes, but still have nice touches like rounded corners and shadows. The solution to achieve this was based on a lot of Javascript code being executed once the page was loaded, which worked great. Unfortunately, it became apparent that in long pages, with a lot of posts or comments, this slowed down the rendering of the page considerably. Version 3.1 introduces a new technique - when you choose new colors for your theme, vSlider pre-renders the matching rounded corners and stores them as normal image files on the server side. This is done only once. Then the theme templates will use these to assemble the post frame, using regular HTML. This results in no Javascript code, and it is much, much faster. The image generation is completely done in PHP and adjusts to any selection, so any color combination is possible. The only restriction is that you must have the GD library enabled in your PHP installation. I believe this to be the case for most people, but in case you don’t have it, you can either enable it or ask your host provider to do that for you. vSlider will tell you if you can use this feature or not. If you can’t, you can still use the previous Javascript way - for most websites, this is also a good alternative.

On Gallery, the most important change is that Lightbox spans across multiple pages. Before, you could only do Next and Prev on the photos that were actually visible in a single page. Now it includes all photos of the chosen album.

There are also new features, such as configurable number of open posts, showing the post author under the title, support for the native WP tags, new subnavigation bar, better support for WPG2 and quite a few bug fixes.
You can get more details from the download pages.

Hope you like this new version - if you do use it, then I strongly encourage you to donate to our OneWorldToSee project. Now only 10 cents a pixel .

Tags: vSlider3
Categories: Maintenance, OneWorldToSee
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Here’s a useful tip: if you barely have enough time to maintain one website, don’t try to maintain two!
That’s a lesson I’ve learned kind of the hard way So I migrated all the content over from OneWorldToSee to this one – seemed like the logical thing to do, considering this is the most active blog…

Also, for the first time since I started iRui.ac, I’ve decided to change the width – I’m still quite fond of the original 800 pixel base, but I have to admit is quite narrow for modern resolutions. And the extra space does come in handy.

In other news, I’m now running the latest vSlider 3.1, which I will be making available for download shortly. I’ll go into detail about what’s new when it’s ready, but the most obvious and important change is that the speed of rendering the pages should now be drastically higher than before. If you are a regular here, you probably already noticed it

Finally, the “Sale” initiative for squares on the OneWorldToSee map has now become permanent. That means that from now on, the standard donation for every square is just $10. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, read this

Categories: Maintenance, OneWorldToSee
1 Comment »