Posts by HaraldJ

HaraldJ · CE4 Stage

Hi there,

Thanks for reading! I have switched a lot of photo work to a Mac, but almost all of my website content is on a Win10 machine with LR6 and the full CE4 product line.

When I wanted to change a virtual tour on a CE4 Stage site, I found that all plugins had disappeared from Lightroom. It was easy to install CE4 Publisher again, and all the plugins, including Stage, appeared again in the web view, but all the settings seem to have gone.

Does anyone know where they are stored? I guess it's somewhere in the LR6 database, but it there a way to get them back?

Would a restore of an older version of the LR6 database help?

If all that fails - where, on a website, is the content of a page (https://www.haraldjoergens.com/panoramas/lancaster/) stored, in case I have to edit directly, without LR?

Thanks!!!

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Theme for WordPress

rod barbee wrote:

Harald,
I don't see any problems with your blog page or your single posts. All have a sidebar with Search, Archives, and Tag Cloud widgets.
All your blog page layouts are using the the Single Post 01 Sidebar.
If you need different sidebar configuration, say of the Blog home page, then assign a different sidebar, like Blog Home. Then a new widget area will appear under Appearances > Widgets.
I just tried that and got the Tabula Rasa! on the blog home page, which should be expected as I didn't add anything to the Blog Home Widget area right away.
I've since added the Search, Archives, and Tag cloud so it will look like it did before.
All seems to be working as expected.

Hi Rod,

Thank you very much for having a look! It's very odd - I can't see any sidebar anywhere on my blog, not with Firefox/IE/Opera/Chrome on the PC, and not with any browser I have on the iPad! So I'm very puzzled that you see a sidebar!

Best regards

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Theme for WordPress

rod barbee wrote:

In the WordPress dashboard, under Appearance > Theme Options > Layout you'll see that there are page layouts for Home, three post templates, three page templates, and others.. Assign page layouts here to include sidebars either left or right.
After you do this, those sidebar widget areas will appear in Appearance > Widgets. Then populate the widget areas.

Hi Rod,

Thanks for the quick response. I had done all the steps you describe already, and they don't make any difference, that's why I'm a bit lost! I'm happy to PM you admin login information to the blog if that could help to resolve the issue!

Best regards

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Theme for WordPress

Hi Forum,

Thanks for reading. Before the transition to CE4 I had no problems at all with the CE3 Wordpress plugin, and the blog on www.haraldjoergens.com was just fine.

With CE4 and the CE4 Wordpress plugin, I seem to have only one sidebar on the right hand side - which makes sense, that's what's configured in the Lightroom CE4 settings.

But the exported blog on the website has no sidebar on the right hand side at all - instead there seems to be one at the bottom, telling me "Tabula rasa! This sidebar is empty, or you've tried to assign a sidebar that doesn't exist. Nurture this space via your admin.".

In the widgets editor there is only one sidebar I can populate, and it doesn't matter at all what I put in there, nothing changes.

Does the above ring any bells what the problem might be, and how to resolve it?

Thanks!

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Ben wrote:

Hi Harald, is there any semblance of order? e.g. lowercase alphabetical followed by uppercase alphabetical?
Publisher obtains that list in an unconventional way. It looks for the preferences directory that holds watermarks, opens each file, tries to find a watermark ID and title within the file and if successful adds those details to the the list of available watermarks. The title of the watermark doesn't correspond with the file name, so the order is lost, assuming files were returned in alphabetical order in the first place.
I'll add ordering to my to-do list.

Hi Ben,

Thanks! I can't see any particular order, this is what the list looks like right now:

Best regards

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

As mentioned in another post, with CE4 came a change in the currentPageURL() function. If the port is not 80, the port number becomes part of the URL:

        if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
            $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
        } else {
            $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
        }

This has so many nasty side effects that I'm replacing it with

            $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

for all the generated files. Of course that makes only sense for websites using HTPPS.

One side effect is for images to be used in Facebook, the OpenGraph debugger doesn't like it at all, and rejects the image.

It might be better to add extra handling for HTTPS when creating the OpenGraph metatags, Facebook prefers <meta property="og:image:secure_url" instead of <meta property="og:image:".

That's why I am replacing, in all template_index.php files, the og:image line with

    <meta property="og:image:secure_url" content="<?php echo ($album ? $album->getURL() : currentPageLocation().'/'); ?>photos/<?php echo basename($album->getCoverImage()); ?>" />

Then Facebook happily accepts the photo.

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

It's a great improvement in CE4 that a watermark can be selected for an individual gallery.

It would be even better if the watermarks selection list in the Publisher dialog would be sorted. I have over 30 watermarks, and it's a bit annoying to find the right one in what seems to be a random order.

Thanks!!!

Harald

HaraldJ · General

A few days ago I found a brilliant tool on the web: It's a software that not only validates the code of a CE4 website (the W3C validator does that for free), it checks for the compliance with loads of standards. The analysis contains loads of useful information.

There are desktop versions for Mac and Windows, and there's an online version as well. It's called "Sortsite", from PowerMapper.com.

I have nothing to do with company other than that I think their product is brilliant, and for me certainly worth the money.

HaraldJ · CE4 Gallery

An update on the site translation issue:

After I had to remove Google Translate because their jQuery clashed with CE4, I have been looking for a suitable alternative.

And I found one that might be better than that of the advertising sales guys from California: Bing Translate.

It's free, very easy to implement, and can automatically translate the website to the viewer's browser language. And it allows changes to their translation, most helpful if you know how to improve the automated translation of the website.

Most importantly: It does work with CE4!

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Talking about sitemaps:

If you are using a software or a service to create your sitemaps, it might be a good idea to exclude any links that contain

-single.php
thumbnails
sender.a.getAttribute('data-gps')
http://maps.google.com

If you don't exclude *-single.php, every photo will be seen as a page.

And if you don't exclude *thumbnails*, your image sitemap will include three entries for every photo, one from /photos, one from /thumbnails, and one from /thumbnails-for-mobile.

The sender.a.getAttribute('data-gps') makes sense if you are using map information in your galleries, without this exclusion parameter you might get a large number of broken links.

And the Google Maps parameter stops every single photo with map information from being added as an extra page with Google Map information.

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Matthew wrote:

Sounds like the whole thing is misbehaving with Pages, as you have observed. It's possible that we might have unintentionally broken the function through the course of evolving the product, making codebase modifications for the sake of the publisher, etc. We probably made changes to the galleries, echoed those changes through all of the plugins for consistency in code, and neglected to account for this outcome. We will probably need to revisit the functions in CE4 Pages.

Today I have replaced, for all files on the website, the CE4 canonical tag code with the code from CE3:

CE4:

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo currentPageLocation(); ?>/" />

CE3:

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo currentPageLocation(); ?>/<?php echo currentPageName(); ?>" />

It was a test, and if anything goes wrong, I can go back to the original version.

But the sitemap building seems to go well now, and I tried the galleries on mobile devices, where they seem to be working without any problems.

I also added some experimental code to deal with the SEO pagination problem, search engines will see duplicate content when they go through galleries with more than one page (see here for the technical background).

Thanks to the excellent PHP code in CE4, it seemed quite simple to add two additional meta-tags, "prev" and "next". This example is from page 5 of a gallery:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.haraldjoergens.com:443/galleries/rowing/the-boat-race/2016-01-31-cuwbc-vs-obubc/index.php" />

<link rel="prev" href="https://www.haraldjoergens.com:443/galleries/rowing/the-boat-race/2016-01-31-cuwbc-vs-obubc/index.php?page=4" />
<link rel="next" href="https://www.haraldjoergens.com:443/galleries/rowing/the-boat-race/2016-01-31-cuwbc-vs-obubc/index.php?page=6" />

I'll find out what the web crawlers will make of it!

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Matthew wrote:

HaraldJ wrote:
In the line that creates the "canonical" meta-tag I think it should be function getcurrentPageURL() instead of getcurrentPageLocation(), but I'm looking further into it to understand why the sitemap doesn't cover anything within /galleries/.
Not so. Using getcurrentPageURL() would, for mobile galleries, return mobile.php; that's exactly what the canonical URLs are in place to prevent. For galleries, we want the mobile gallery pages to canonically be read as the main index.php, hence our use of getcurrentPageLocation().

Thanks, Matt!

I see your point, but do you have an idea why building a sitemap ignores the galleries then?

Cheers

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Just had a look at the CE3 code:

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo currentPageLocation(); ?>/<?php echo currentPageName(); ?>" />

which means something like

CE4 uses

<link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo currentPageLocation(); ?>/" />

which means something like

CE3 doesn't seem to care about HTTP or HTTPS, but sitemap building worked fine,
CE4 does care about HTTP and HTTPS, and sitemap building doesn't work.

That's not an analysis, just an observation. I still don't know where exactly the sitemap building goes wrong.

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

HaraldJ wrote:

Ben wrote:
Hi Harald, that's strange. Does this line:
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80" && strpos($host, ':') === false) {
Now look exactly like this line?
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80" && strpos($host, ':') !== false) {
Hi Ben,
Yes, it does. I tried it twice, only changing the "===" to "!==" instead of copying and pasting the line, and the result was the same.
Looking at the code, I find it strange too, but I don't want to fiddle too much with a live website.
Of course I don't have a certificate on my test subdomain or localhost, to I can't really test HTTPS in a test environment.
Cheers
Harald

Ben,

With a but more testing, I think the function currentPageLocation() is correct after all.

In the line that creates the "canonical" meta-tag I think it should be function getcurrentPageURL() instead of getcurrentPageLocation(), but I'm looking further into it to understand why the sitemap doesn't cover anything within /galleries/.

Cheers

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

rod barbee wrote:

Hi Ben,
As another data point, I made the same change to my galleries.php file and I'm seeing no difference at all in the output page source code. I'm not getting the same error that Harald is seeing.

Rob, did you test on an HTTPS site?

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Ben wrote:

Hi Harald, that's strange. Does this line:
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80" && strpos($host, ':') === false) {
Now look exactly like this line?
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80" && strpos($host, ':') !== false) {

Hi Ben,

Yes, it does. I tried it twice, only changing the "===" to "!==" instead of copying and pasting the line, and the result was the same.
Looking at the code, I find it strange too, but I don't want to fiddle too much with a live website.
Of course I don't have a certificate on my test subdomain or localhost, to I can't really test HTTPS in a test environment.

Cheers

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Ben wrote:

Thanks Rod. It looks like there may be a logic error in the code. Harald, can you try changing:
=== false
to:
!== false
?

Hi Ben,

Thanks! The change has a nasty side effect on other lines, and it turns this:

      
      <meta property="og:image" content="https://www.haraldjoergens.com:443/photos/????????.DNG.jpg" />
      <meta property="og:site_name" content="<!--TitleToReplace-->" />

into an "unexpected <" PHP error in the second line. I guess you are right about the problem, but just changing the "equals" to "not equals" has implications.

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

Ben wrote:

Hi Harald, can you post the contents of the currentPage functions as found in the template?

Hi Ben,

Here is the code from galleries.php. It's quite different to the very short function from CE3.

Thanks!

Harald

if (!function_exists('currentPageLocation')) {
        // Gets current page parent location
        function currentPageLocation() {

            $currentPageURL = currentPageURL();
            $returnURL = '';

            $finalSlash = strrpos(currentPageURL(), '/');
            if (strrpos($currentPageURL, '.') > strrpos($currentPageURL, '/')) // has a file after the final slash, e.g. http://url/directory/index.php
                $returnURL = substr($currentPageURL, 0, $finalSlash);
            else if (strrpos($currentPageURL, '?') > strrpos($currentPageURL, '/')) // has a ? after the final slash, e.g. http://url/directory/index.php
                $returnURL = substr($currentPageURL, 0, $finalSlash);
            else if ($finalSlash == strlen($currentPageURL)-1) // final character is a slash, e.g. http://url/directory/
                $returnURL = substr($currentPageURL, 0, $finalSlash);
            else // final character is not a slash, e.g. http://url/directory
                $returnURL = $currentPageURL;

            return $returnURL;
        }

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

rod barbee wrote:

The problem seems to be specific to galleries.php, where the canonical tag refers to the root, instead of galleries.php
I think that's what's supposed to happen. All pages in the root of the site will give the same result. The code gives the parent location of the page.
If you were to be looking at a gallery's index page the the canonical url would be something like yoursite.com/galleries/some-index/actual-gallery/
So it shows the folder, not the file.

Hi Rob,

Please have look at this Google information. The canonical should not point to the folder.

I have hardcoded the correct information in galleries.php, and the sitemap generation gets a bit further but is then stuck again, so I guess that problem isn't limited to galleries.php.

Cheers

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

rod barbee wrote:

Just looking at the code in the exported php file, the comment for the function currentPageLocation shows that the function "Gets current page parent location". Which, for those pages in the root of the site, will yield the site url.
I don't know where the :443 is coming from in yours. Mine (from the galleries.php page or any of the pages generated by CE4 Pages) looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://rodbarbee.com/" />
if I come to my site by going to http://rodbarbee.com
or this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://barbeephoto.com/" />
If I go to my site using http://barbeephoto.com
(I redirect the rodbarbee.com url to barbeephoto.com)
So it doesn't look like this is coming from TTG, rather, it's coming from the server.
that 443 is in several places in your source code and my guess is that it's coming from your host.
Matt or Ben will have to comment about any "fix", if there is one.

Hi Rob,

Thanks for having a look. The 443 is the port for HTTPS, so that's correct, and comes indeed from the server.

On most pages all seems to be correct, I picked a random page and find

which is correct.

The problem seems to be specific to galleries.php, where the canonical tag refers to the root, instead of galleries.php.

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

After the update from CE3 to CE4, the website is now running since a few days. One problem has come up:

In CE3, building sitemaps and image sitemaps has been no problem at all. In CE4, the sitemaps are almost empty.

The reason seems to be related to wrong canonical tags:

In galleries.php, line 50 reads

when it should be

The PHP code line in the exported "galleries.php" is

Does anyone have an idea what's going wrong or, more importantly, how to fix it?

Thanks!

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

rod barbee wrote:

Will the migration tool then put a modified CE3temp into the ttg-be/galleries directory?
your CE3 template will not be modified as far as I know. I do believe that it will be placed in the /ttg-be/templates/gallery/ folder. I did my migration well over a year ago so I have to go by memory. I don't recall any problems at all.
What I can tell you is that when I did my migration, the old albums were all still where I expected them to be and they still looked like the old site until I assigned the new template to them. It all went really smoothly.
When I replace the CE3 files with CE4, will the website, and all galleries, still work with the updated CE3temp, or will they be dead until I manually swap templates in CE4 Publisher?
the rest of the site itself won't be affected by new gallery and autoindex templates. Only your album sets and albums will be affected.
Your albums will look like they used to until you change templates.
you'll see some CE3 related .xml files (as well as some php files) in the galleries/ folder and in the existing album set and album folders. I believe these can just be deleted once you update everything to CE4 templates. But to be sure, just rename them first and make sure everything is still working correctly before finally deleting them.
Mine are actually still in those folders. They're so small that I haven't bothered to delete them.

Hi Rob,

Thank you very much, that all sounds very reassuring!

There is another update feature in the TTG-BE Publisher Admin, the "Special link" called "Update Album Files". It says "This function updates the supporting files for all Albums and Album Sets".

1) Is this to be used together with the Lightroom migration tool?
2) If yes, I guess it should be run after the Lightroom migration?
3) What does it do?

Thank you very much, with your help I'm getting somewhere!

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

rod barbee wrote:

1) I'm aware that, after the migration, I cant use CE3 Publisher to manage the galleries. Will the website still work, when all the TTG modules are still the CE3 versions, or do I have to do the Publisher migration and the CE3 to CE4 file replacements at the same time?
the CE3 version design will be still be there until you change the template. If you export and upload a CE4 Gallery template with the same name as your CE3 template, then you won't have to go through each album and change the template, it will just happen automatically.
2) Will the migration tool populate the Publisher database with image metadata, to allow the use of the Publisher search after the migration?
As long as the metadata was there to begin with.
3) Will the migration tool create a similar file structure as the one it found in the CE3 instance, for the new CE4 album sets and albums?
folder/file structure won't change. The only change is that the CE4 version of Publisher is now controlling the album sets and albums.
4) What's the best way to deal with different template names? All my CE3 templates names begin with "CE3_", so I obviously don't want those in CE4.
I faced the same situation. I just uploaded new templates and then went through each album set and album and changed templates.
5) After the migration, can I manage the freshly converted galleries with the CE4 Publisher plugin?
Yes. That's the whole point.
6) Are there any known issues that could happen, or that I should be aware of, before I click the OK button in the Migrate Publisher tool?
As far as I know, just the ones listed in the documentation. Particularly the requirement that you haven't published anything with CE4 Publisher prior to migration.
Apart from the migration, there is one thing that could be an issue: image sizes. If you create a new CE4 template that uses different large image and thumbnail image sizes, you'll need to republish all albums. And when you do, go to Publisher Settings and make sure that the "Push metadata without updating existing photos" box is unchecked.

Hi Rod,

Thanks for the detailed response, it helps a lot!

One thing isn't yet clear to me:

Assume all my CE3 galleries use template CE3temp, and I have set up a new template for CE4, CE4temp.

I run the migration tool, with TTG-BE in place, but the actual website still running CE3.

Will the migration tool then put a modified CE3temp into the ttg-be/galleries directory?

When I replace the CE3 files with CE4, will the website, and all galleries, still work with the updated CE3temp, or will they be dead until I manually swap templates in CE4 Publisher?

Thanks!!!

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Publisher

The new CE4 configuration seems to be almost complete. Updating the existing CE3 website, with a lot of galleries containing a lot of photos, is going to be the next major, and critical, task.

I have read the document about migrating existing albums from CE3 to CE4 Publisher, but before I run the migration, I'd like to ask the experts:

1) I'm aware that, after the migration, I cant use CE3 Publisher to manage the galleries. Will the website still work, when all the TTG modules are still the CE3 versions, or do I have to do the Publisher migration and the CE3 to CE4 file replacements at the same time?

2) Will the migration tool populate the Publisher database with image metadata, to allow the use of the Publisher search after the migration?

3) Will the migration tool create a similar file structure as the one it found in the CE3 instance, for the new CE4 album sets and albums?

4) What's the best way to deal with different template names? All my CE3 templates names begin with "CE3_", so I obviously don't want those in CE4.

5) After the migration, can I manage the freshly converted galleries with the CE4 Publisher plugin?

6) Are there any known issues that could happen, or that I should be aware of, before I click the OK button in the Migrate Publisher tool?

Sorry for the long list, I don't want my busy website down because I overlooked something.

Thanks!!!

Harald

HaraldJ · CE4 Gallery

Matthew wrote:

HaraldJ wrote:
I've never heard of that before, but it looks interesting, and I'll have a look if I use that, instead of my solution. Thank you!
You might not have heard the term, but I'm sure you're well familiar with this type of UI element. Loads of websites have used it for a very long time, and Lightroom's own sidebar panels open and close in accordion fashion. It should handle the task with aplomb.

Thanks, Matt, I have replaced the jQuery-based code with a plain CSS accordion, and it seems to be working well. Your input has been most helpful!

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 CE4 Stage » CE4 on Win10 - all settings have gone » 2020-02-26 03:53:28

#2 Re: CE4 Theme for WordPress » CE4 Wordpress Sidebar problem - Tabula Rasa! » 2016-05-11 04:42:49

#3 Re: CE4 Theme for WordPress » CE4 Wordpress Sidebar problem - Tabula Rasa! » 2016-05-10 23:51:55

#4 CE4 Theme for WordPress » CE4 Wordpress Sidebar problem - Tabula Rasa! » 2016-05-10 02:39:47

#5 Re: CE4 Publisher » Unsorted watermarks list » 2016-02-22 19:08:27

#6 CE4 Publisher » HTTPS and Facebook » 2016-02-22 01:19:30

#7 CE4 Publisher » Unsorted watermarks list » 2016-02-21 21:23:41

#8 General » A cool tool » 2016-02-09 04:22:01

#9 Re: CE4 Gallery » Gallery Large Image Presentation problems » 2016-02-09 01:08:16

#10 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-07 21:33:47

#11 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-06 04:35:10

#12 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-05 13:33:26

#13 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-05 05:18:42

#14 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-05 00:22:55

#15 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-05 00:12:33

#16 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-04 18:15:23

#17 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-04 16:49:43

#18 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-04 07:40:23

#19 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-04 04:04:50

#20 Re: CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-04 02:30:44

#21 CE4 Publisher » "canonical" issue » 2016-02-04 01:03:58

#22 Re: CE4 Publisher » Updating galleries from CE3 to CE4 » 2016-01-16 17:00:50

#23 Re: CE4 Publisher » Updating galleries from CE3 to CE4 » 2016-01-16 06:08:30

#24 CE4 Publisher » Updating galleries from CE3 to CE4 » 2016-01-16 04:08:35

#25 Re: CE4 Gallery » Gallery Large Image Presentation problems » 2016-01-14 00:05:21

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