• Added Gravatar support for “post authors” (enabled through the regular Posts panel on the vSlider Theme Options). Only available for WP 2.5 and above.
• Also added Gravator support for “comment authors” (enabled through a new Comments panel in the vSlider Theme Options). Also only available for WP 2.5 and above.
• Now it’s possible to select the location of the top menu (right, center or left). Until now, the menu was always on the right.
• Added a new option to center the header image (useful for non-repeating images when using Fluid width).
• Added support for PNG and GIF files for headers (only supported JPG before). Also fixed a small bug where files with extensions in upper case were not correctly identified.
• Added support for the “nextpage” quicktag, which allows breaking a big post into multiple pages.
• Adjusted a bit the layout of the vSlider Theme Options in line with the new WP administration look and feel.
• Fixed an issue in the KBurnalizer library which resulted in some weird looking fading effects.
• Fixed a bug in the header that resulted in the inner corners being hidden when using KBurnalizer.
• Removed the 200 return code on the 404 page.
• Fixed a small display bug on the bottom of the 404 page.
• Fixed a bug on the RSS feed of Comments.
• Fixed a bug in the comments sections where in some situations the author’s comments weren’t properly colored.
• Fixed a bug that prevent Dynamic albums from working in Gallery2.

Hope you enjoy the new features and that with this update most of those pesky little problems that have been around for some time are finally fixed. However, there are still some known issues that some users have found when using vSlider that I can’t really solve since they are related to other scripts. These are the ones I am aware of:

• Enabling the internal the Lightbox script of WPG2 breaks the slide up/down feature on the posts. The workaround is to keep this option disabled and use the WP Lightbox plugin instead.
• Using any Lightbox script (either from WPG2 or the standalone plugin) prevents editing some theme options in Gallery2. This problem affects ANY embedded theme, not just vSlider. I’ve informed one the authors of WPG2 about this issue.
• When using vSlider in Gallery2 with the Lightscript plugin activated, the “title” of the pictures that pops out when hovering the mouse doesn’t look “nice”, because it includes some HTML markup code. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid this, since Lightbox uses this field for the description text below the photo, and in the case of vSlider, this text has the link to the original photo page.

I’m also making some minor layout changes around this site, mostly to kindly remember everyone to donate to our OneWorldToSee project. There are *so* many users of vSlider out there - it should’t be that hard to fill the map, should it?

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 .

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

I checked a bit more the newest versions of WP and WPG2.

The new WPG2 3.0 seems to be working fine with vSlider3 - the only minor problem is that WPG2 now creates a top-level page to serve as an entry point to the embedded gallery. Since the vSlider theme was already adding this link to the top navigation, now there will be two different links to the same location - not very pretty. The quickfix for this is to edit this page and change the status to “draft”, so that it doesn’t show up on the navigation (don’t delete it! WPG2 will revert to full page Gallery2 and that won’t work).

I’ve also checked the changes required to support the new native tag functionality of WP 2.3. To be honest, I wasn’t very impressed with this - I think that the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin offers far more functionality, and personally I’m not ready to drop it just yet in favor of WP only. But if you really want to use it instead, here are the changes you need to make.

• In file: \vSlider3\post.html
  on line 44 insert this code:
  Quick Code

  <?php if (function_exists('the_tags')) the_tags("Tags: ",",","") ?>

• In file \vSlider3\archive.html:
  on line 32 add this code:
  Quick Code

  <?php /* If this is a tag archive */ } elseif (function_exists('the_tags') && is_tag()) { ?>
  <h2 class="pagetitle"><?php _e('Other posts related to ', 'vSlider'); echo $tag; ?></h2>

• In file vSlider3\archiveBoxes.html
  Add this code at the end of the file:
  Quick Code

  <?php if (function_exists('wp_tag_cloud')) { ?>
  <?php $puid = md5(microtime().rand(10000, 32000)); ?>
  <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/postTop.html'); ?>
  <h2 id="post-<?php echo $puid; ?>" class="single-title"><?php _e("Tag Cloud", "vSlider"); ?></h2>
  <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/postMiddle.html'); ?>
  
  <?php wp_tag_cloud() ?>
  
  <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/postBottom.html'); ?>
  <?php } ?>

The only thing that is missing is the support for the new tags feature. Since WP didn’t have native support for tags, vSlider3 was built to use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, if this was installed. So, if you upgrade to 2.3 and start adding tags to your posts, you only be able to actually see them.
In a few days I will publish a hot fix for this as well (it’s rather easy, but I want to make it works ok first).

Everything else seems to be working fine.