Whats happening with Photopost
 

It seems to me it's kinda grinded to a halt. The blog at the top is very outdated in terms of activity. Photopost seems to be losing it's luster with no new developments mentioned that I have seen. It seems to be falling behind in many areas.

Is there something new on the horizon, or is Photopost slowly heading to the graveyard?

Well, I think improvements have been made from 5.0 to 6.0 and now 7.0 but a lot needs to be done for PP to stay in competition.

I have 4 or 5 licenses and I would not like to see the product go away. I think it would be wise for PP administration to go after innovative ideas and how pictures/galleries are being delivered across the web by flickr, wordpress plugins, to name a few.

PP will have to step it up a notch, and not waste time on kiddie, newbie features like flash uploader!!! As they say, content is king and today, as more and more people generate content in form of articles, they need pictures in their articles to make it more attractive for their readers. With modern galleries, people can easily embed entire categories (thumbnails) within their articles but NOT with PP.

Same functionality should be extended to allow other sites, blogs to embed galleries on their websites, EASILY and with auto generated code by PP. We've been using RSS at Auto Talk but had to pay for modifications to rss feed and how its displayed. Not a good deal for users just looking to add some flavor to their site without paying and modifying the code.

I would also like to see PP look into integration with wordpress. It would be a HUGE market for photopost and surprised its not been tapped by Enthusiasts Inc. yet!

well as wordpress changes we will look at it

I know awhile back when it was young I looked at it and really got no help from wordpress and got stuck on the final piece of the puzzle. That is reading the cookie and creating the wordpress cookie.

I could never find in there files where the code was to create those encrypted cookie strings so it was near impossible to write an integration as a result.

Chuck, it seems you missed the point of this thread called "Whats happening with Photopost". There are a few threads now in this forum discussing this very issue about the software being outdated and not much happening on the development front. What we would like you to do is to reveal Photopost future plans, if there are any updates and features going to happen any time soon. What can we expect by the end of 2010 and in 2011? Thanks.

Peppies alot of development has happening in the past couple years and any improvements are noted in the release announcements forum.

There is nothing more to report since 7.x series was released 8 month ago and we have no open beta for Pro right now as development phase is centered in vbGallery beta right now.

Just noticed that I've been a member of this forum before you!

Anyhow, the bottom line is that there have been a lot of little changes here and there. Overall I'm happy with the product but, the appearance needs a makeover and some additionally mentioned functions / features should really be looked into.

The forums are stale which means you can't be doing too well in the sales dept. If you were, I would imagine the tech support forums would be bombarded with queries like in the past. Then again, if everyone is disabled (like me) I could understand how you keep those disgruntled posts at a minimum.

Seriously though... Are there any plans to do something new with this product or will it look like a 1984 Camaro forever? We need some innovation here. I'm sorry to say that this will most certainly be my last donation unless something drastically changes... but hey, it's only $40.00 bux right?

Dennis yes you have been around awhile so you definately know how things work. Anyone who has participated in our beta cycles knows our company listens to its customers and most all features and additions to the programs are customer requests.

I see people here saying the product needs a face lift but if I visit our suggestions forum I really don't see any specific ideas. I would like to see customer ideas on how they think things should look.

Nothing is going to change with Pro at this current time until we enter a beta period for that product which is probally later this year. What I would suggest to anyone looking at this thread is if you have specific ideas feel free to post suggestions in the PhotoPost Pro suggestions forum.

Constructive Criticism is great and I love it personally but just saying I don't like the interface or how things look outdated doesnt really say anything specfic. That is like someone asking for support and saying I can't upload. ;) Please post suggestions in the proper forum on specifically what you would like to see.

:)

Cool... I was looking at another piece of software last night. It looked to be a perfect solution with 1 drawback... No integration with vBulletin. This is really the only reason your product is still on my site. I'll gather the thoughts in this thread and paste them into the suggestions forum. Are you by any chance OCD? Just sayin...

I have been called OCD ;)

I was just at the vBulletin site and I see that they have a Photo Gallery with Photo Tagging coming in version 5 It might come late 2011 or even early 2012

vBulletin Community Forum

I think it would be a nice touch now to act, In the suggestion forum there are lots of unused Ideas that are some a few years old.

Some of them are

Option to use foums user profile
Tagging like facebook
share photos on facebook
Better contest mod with voting for first, second and third
Allow user to view only x number of photos before registration
Better template control
Language manager.
Integrate the search engin with vBulletin
Merge users

This is just what comes to mind


I love what is being done to vBgallery but I do not think that Photopost PRO users should have to wait while Photopost vBgallery is developed, Pro is the orginal product and should be the cornerstone and not come in second place.


We can't wait for the competition and see what they will bring, we must stay a head and make them compete with us.

Other idea which you may consider is the fact that MEDIUM picture is under 3-4 bars.

You have the navbar, the pp menu, then the pp breadcrumb links, etc.

Maybe that approach should be changed. Bring the MEDIUM picture just below the vbulletin navbar, make a 300px column on right or left of the picture which replace the pp links. Also, PP breadcrumb should be where vbulletin breadcrumb is.

Instead of having option for 1 or 3 rows in filmstrip, make it more flexible.

Expand RSS feed option for tags. Well before that happens, make tags more like how the rest of the world/web uses them (look at modern CMSes like wordpress, joomla, etc.) .

TOTAL integration of comments and discussions with vbulletin. If someone wants to comment on the picture, open a thread for them or redirect them to a forum on vbulletin side and open a thread linking the medium picture back to the pp side instead of having admins/mods moderate two forums/discussions.

I haven't bought a licence renewal for some time and I am still at version 6. Currently I see no need to upgrade, because I see no appealing features in PP 7. PP is a good gallery, but misses a lot of integration with vbulletin and as others have mentioned in this thread, the interface and feature set is outdated.

The lack of integration causes my users to miss new photos and barely anyone discusses photo's on PP. Mind that I have a big board. Combining vbulletin with PP will result in 3 image systems: attachments, albums and photopost. That adds a lot of confusion and hassle to the user.

I do think a flashuploader is a good improvement. I remember drooling over it back in 2005. Nice to see it will be a reality now.

What I am missing:

• Make PP a vbulletin content type.
• Use vbulletin comments.
• Integrate with vbulletin search and 'what's new' button.
• Add vb reputation to entries.
• Integrate with or replace vbulletin profile albums.
• Integrate with the attachment manager.
• Integrate with groups images and blog images.
• vb widgets and forums side blocks
• integrate with vbulletin tags
• A number of Image Sliders and Content Sliders to display in vbadvanced and vbCMS
• pictorials / tutorials
• carousels & accordions
• import albums from flickr, etc.
• YUI, jQuery enhancements to the UI
• iPhone / android widget
• Google Image search enhancements / sitemap

A careful review of wordpress plugins, flickr and the modern UI of imagevuex will give you a good idea of what features are missing.

I do think that with vbulletin image gallery coming up, PP really needs to outperform it by far to stay attractive. The vb image gallery will be available in the suite for no additional cost. PP has been one of the top products for quite a while because there was little real competition and PP had most of the modern functionality until some years ago.

Well just a point of clarification on some things here.

Now in vb4 there are tons of blocks and content that can be displayed in the actual forum or CMS. I know I wrote the hacks for those and they are posted in the MOD FORUMS. That mod actually shows gallery stuff in the vb user profile. Basically one little option added to Photopost's options for a switch and a line or two of code in the global file in the construct ppurl function and we can send users to the forum profile that is easy and I think I can see that happening easily in the next version. I plan to do that in Reviewpost and Classifieds once I open betas on them. A language manager has been part of Reviewpost and Classifieds for some time so I would think some of that stuff should be added to Pro.

There are alot of nice ideas above although some actually deal with displaying our content outside of our own program which is really mod discussions. There will be some new updated features added I am sure but the next release I think is going to be streamlining and updating the interface as right now thats the top priority I hear from customers.

I know things I am looking at right now for all programs are going to be new integrations like wordpress and xenforo etc because alot of people are jumping ship from vBulletin over the version 4 fiasco. Other things I am looking at personally is using the vb comment interface throughout the program just not comments. Redoing all the templates diving deeper into the vb4 styles now that vb4 has had time to settle down some with there bugs.

Sorry if I am posting in the wrong area. I am a bit confused but that never stopped me before.

ChuckS you seem the man with the plan and eye for the future. I have my Photo POST installs hacked to the point they likely cannot be recognized as your products any more to the outsider. Maybe we have a lot you could use. Not sure. You would be welcome to any of it.

My only question here is: Can you divulge who the 3rd party plug-in for the flash uploader is? I am about to install a flash uploader and then learned you have one so I upgraded here I guess it was to your latest release. Now I see it does not work with flash 10 but expect that will be fixed.

Anywho... Are you using uploadify or another? I will surely need to hack it to death as well to use it for our customized needs and knowing who makes it may help me do so....

I say me and I am not a coder but hire it all done.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Charlie

Charlie the flash upload makers are listed in the change log file in the documentation folder of the downloaded code.

And PLEASE clean up the URLs when using SEO:

defencetalk.com/pictures/b-228usa-29/p38379-usaf-b-2-spirit-stealth-bomber.html

The part after /pictures/ looks really screwed up and ugly. If category name has "parentheses" then they are replaced by "28name-29," totally ridiculous.

Thank you Chuck. Even I should be able to find this without my coder.

Side note if there are any advanced VB and PP coders out there reading this seeking work, please contact me. gladhatter@gladhatter.net if I am allowed to post this. If not please edit my post.

I guess I have my products confused as per usual We run the older versions of this and are upgrading now to this: product_vbgallery3_RC2

Does this have the flash uploader and if so please tell me where to find the maker of it?

There is clearly a flash uploader in there: E:\Download folder\product_vbgallery3_RC2\product_vbgallery3_RC2\upload\gallery\clientscript\flash However I cannot find any documentation folder or change log. ????

Please help.

I am not sure what documentation the beta has but you can ask questions about the beta in the beta forum.

The flash uploader should be SWFUpload