vSlider 3.1 is out
Mon 21, January 2008 23:29:11The 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 
.
10 Responses to “vSlider 3.1 is out”
Hi Rui, thanks for this version! And I really really promise I’ll contribute by the weekend!
But first, I have a problem - WPG2 items are all broken - I’ve been through all the settings - I just don’t know where to start looking. The file it refers to certainly exists. But, like several others, I’ve had to modify a line in the theme.inc file from
if(include(’./wp-config.html’)) {
to
if(include(’/home/mysite/public_html/blog/wp-config.html’)) {
but this breaking seems quite recent. Any help would be appreciated!
What do you mean by broken? Is it the spacing between items? You can adjust how many pixels to use for both rows and columns in the vSlider theme options in the Gallery2 administration.
By broken, I mean pages of errors instead of pictures.
I found the solution in the gallery forums http://gallery.menalto.com/node/73100
Essentially, the solution is
cd ~/wp-content/plugins/wpg2/
ln -s ../../../gallery2/modules/ modules
I had to put
ln -s ../../../../gallery2/modules/ modules
because gallery and wp are at the same “level”. Anyway, it’s not a problem with vSlider3.1, so that is a good thing!
That’s weird - please correct my mistaken link above - it should, of course, be:
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/73100
Fixed
Love this theme. I’ve been theme surfing for days and this seems to fit the bill.
2 things:
When I only have one header photo in the header directory, only one page has a photo. the rest are blank space. So I uploaded 5 photos, and there are 6 pages. One perpetually doesn’t have a header photo. They also don’t rotate at all. They don’t need to necessarily- but i’d like to be able to pick which photo goes to which page if possible.
The Blog title and tag line are not showing up. How do I make these visible? Or do I need to now go photoshop it into all the photos? Please tell me there’s just a way to make it show over the images.
thanks-
lovely theme!
Never mind. Cleared my cache, pictures seem to be rotating now. Added new photos. Also PSed my title in.
Thanks. Beautiful theme.
Great work!
Astonishingly much faster than 3.0, which was a bit “heavy” in CPU loading.
I had just to set permission for writing wp-content/themes/vSlider3/images/corners for first time prerendering was used, and fine tune the CSS to fit widgets.
Hi Rui! I think I have found a small but easily fixable bug (but I’m not smart enough to work it out!).
When do do something like delete or uninstall a plugin from the gallery admin page, the background goes grey and nothing appears to happen. If you scroll all the way to the top, a hidden window appears behind the main window. Probably just a z-order needs changing? I’ll send you a screen shot and post on blog in case anyone else is having this problem!
Jonathan, ok found the problem - yes, it’s a Z order problem. I wouldn’t really call it a bug, more of “we don’t play along” issue between Gallery2 and vSlider2
Here’s the fix: edit the file gallery2/themes/vSlider3/theme.css and delete line 15 (z-index: 10;). That should do it.
In my defense, I think that the Gallery2 developers should use a Z higher than just 6 for a pop-up window
Care to comment?