Ignite Joomla Extensions

1. Purchase the Component from this website and download it. From the admin interface of Joomla choose Install/Uninstall.

2. Select the com_igallery_0_9.zip file and choose "Upload File and Install."

3. Choose Ignite Gallery from the components menu.

5. Enter your gallery information. Here is an explanation of every field:

• Name: This is shown above the gallery menu picture, in the gallery menu.
• Short Description:This will show below the gallery menu picture, on the gallery menu.
• Long Description:This will show above or below the gallery, depending on the next option.
• Long Description Position: Show long description above or below gallery.
• Meta Title: This is the title of the gallery page, that will be shown right at the top-left of the browser, (in the blue bar on a pc.)
• Meta Description: This will not be seen on the page, it is what Google often displays as a page description in the search results.
• Maximim Image Width: See Maximum Image height below
• Maximim Image Height: If you upload an image bigger than the maximum image width or maximum image height, the component will keep the image aspect ratio, and size the image down so that both the width and height are below the max width and max height.
• Thumbnail Maximum Size: When you upload a thumbnail image, the component will keep the aspect ratio and resize the image down until either the width or height reaches the thumbnail max size, then the component will crop the image so it is square.
• Menu Image: The image that will appear on the gallery menu for this gallery.
• Menu Image Maximim Image Width/ Menu Image Maximim Image Height: Same as Maximim Image Height above, but for the menu image.
• Show Date Created: If yes the date created will show on the gallery menu.
• Show Date Modified: If yes the date modified will show on the gallery menu.
• Description Box Height: The height of the box the image descriptions go in to. If the descriptions are bigger than this height a scroll bar will show.
• Gallery Alignment: If the whole gallery is in a space bigger than it's width, this will make it sit left, middle or right.
• Thumbnail Padding: This is the amount of space around each thumbnail. If you choose 5, every thumbnail image will have a 5px margin of space around all 4 sides.
• Scroller Speed: The scroller speed will increase as the mouse moves closer to the edge of the gallery. This defines the average speed. Note: about .05 to .1 is usually good.
• Scroller Boundary: This is the size of the area that will make the thumbnails scroll if you mouse over it. So if you choose 100, 100px from the right of the gallery will make it scroll right and 100px from the left of the gallery will make it scroll left.
• Scrollbar Color : The color of the background of the description text scrollbar. This is a hexidecimal value without the "#".
• Scrollbar Handle Color : The color of the handle of the description text scrollbar. This is a hexidecimal value without the "#".
• Image Quality (0-100) A higher number means better quality jpegs, but with a bigger file size. I find 60 is about right. Gifs and PNGs are not affected by this. Gifs always have good compression, and PNG photos always have a huge filesize. PNGs are not recommended for photos.
• Show Back to Main Menu Link: A link will be shown on the gallery page if this is yes.
• Lightbox Effect: If yes, you can click on the big image and the image at it's original width and height (the width and height before you uploaded it) will show. The rest of the page will fade to black. A demo of this is on the home page of this site.
• Preload Large Images: If yes the gallery will wait for the page to load, and then start grabbing the larger images in the background. It will grab one every 3/4 of a second. This way when a user clicks on the thumb, there won't be a loading gif and a wait. It will increase your bandwidth though.
• Fade Between Images: If yes when a thumbnail is clicked, one big image will fade out and the next fade in. If no there is no fade. Choosing no works well with preloading the large images.
• Published: Only published Galleries are shown in the front end of the website

6. Choose "Save" from the top right menu.

7. If you want to make any changes to the settings you just entered, click on the name of your gallery. If you change the size of the maximum width, or maximum height, the component will delete all the current images at the current width/height, and remake them with the new width and height. The same thing happens if you change the thumbnail size. If you change the image quality, all of the large images and all of the thumbnails will be deleted, and they will all be remade with the new quality.

If you want to delete your gallery select it and choose the delete button. You will get a pop up box asking you to confirm if you want to delete.

• Main Menu Columns: This is the amount of columns on the gallery menu page.
• Links open in New Window: This is the default for image links, these will be explained in a later step.

---

 

 

10. To publish or unpublish galleries you can click on the green tick/ red cross in the published column.

To change the order that the galleries are shown on the gallery menu, you can click on the order up/ order down arrows, or type the order into the order boxes, and hit the little black save icon, that is a picture of a floppy disk.

To sort the galleries by a column, click on the column heading. This will change the way the galleries are displayed in the administrator panel, not in the front end.

11. To upload photos to your album, choose the "Manage Photos" Link.

12. To upload a single image, browse for the image on your computer. You can upload JPEG, GIF or PNG, although PNG photos are not recommended as they do not compress well, and end up with large file sizes.

If you want an image descrption enter it into the description box. You can put in any special text like headings or links or italics or colored text. Just use the buttons on the Joomla text editor as you would in a Joomla article.

If you want the main image to be a link, enter the link, beginning with "http://www", choose if you want the link to open in a new window. If you do put a link in, the lightbox effect will not work for the image that has a link.

You can also upload a zip file here. Zip the images first (just the images, not the folder they are in) and upload the file. If the file is a zip, no descriptions or links will be entered for any of the photos, you can add these in later.

13. As you upload the images they will appear in the list below the upload button. You can edit the description or the link by clicking on the "edit" word beside the description/link.

You can choose which photos are shown by clicking the green tick/red cross in the publish column.

To change the order that the photos are shown in the front end, you can click on the order up/ order down arrows, or type the order into the order boxes, and hit the little black save icon, that is a picture of a floppy disk.

To delete a photo select the photo/photos and choose delete on the top menu.

24. Your Gallery link will appear on your menu in the front end of the website. If you choose the gallerymenu option all published galleries will be shown here (picture above). Otherwise your selected gallery will be shown. If you want to choose the amount of columns on the gallery menu there is an option in the paramaters (step 9).