Gallery 3 Lightbox and Easy CMS

Hi @Jannis

I’ve successfully integrated Gallery 3 with Easy CMS but am seeking some help with regard to a specific issue.

I’ve set up the site such that the client can place additional images, which means that I have created empty image holders that only appear on the Easy CMS admin page. My problem is that if I enable a lightbox these empty images are shown on the thumbnail trail at the bottom of the lightbox. If I disable the lightbox feature I lose the option to enlarge the images.

I can manage without the thumbnail trail but there doesn’t appear to be an option to omit it.

Any guidance would be welcomed.

Regards,

Bob

Hi Bob,
Do you have a public site to share?
Cheers
Jannis

Hi again Jannis,

I’m developing it on a subdomain at the moment and have only implemented Gallery 3 on the ‘Reproductions’ page, so ignore the other pages which utilise a simple column grid. I bought Gallery 3 today to try to improve the presentation above what was possible with a simple grid while needing to integrate with Easy CMS.

https://www.kilburnlad.net/galval/reproductions/

It’s in French but that shouldn’t matter. I’m doing it for the wife of a friend in France.

Bob

Getting technical here:

Unfortunately your 404 not found page not a real 404 page, as it delivers the page content with a 200 server code.

Could you please try to disable your current 404 page redirect?

Sorry popped out for a dog walk!

To be honest a bit too technical for me. I didn’t set a redirect for the subdomain so have disabled the redirect on my main kilburnlad.net domain. We now just get a 404 error for an incorrect address. I hope this resolves things.

Bob

Weird, just viewed the page again and this time the blank (future images) thumbnails aren’t showing below the lightbox. Surely that can’t be related to the 404 issue? Or did I imagine things before?

Bob

The easy cms integration requires a true 404 page for non-existing/empty images to work.

How did you set up you 404 page (in htaccess?)

I need to do some reading about a ‘true’ 404 page as I clearly didn’t really know what I was doing!

I had this code in my htaccess (now deleted):
ErrorDocument 404 https://www.kilburnlad.net/404error/index.html

And the page it directed to was just a normal RW page with a message and option to return to the home page.

@Kilburnlad You have errors all related to missing CMS images. This looks very much like an EasyCMS issue not putting the correct images in the right place or not naming them correctly.

A far simpler approach would be abandon EasyCMS, and to just have an image drop zone in an admin area, and the user just drops and images into that drop zone and Gallery will pick them up. Doing it this way means that the images will keep their names instead of being renamed to random names by EasyCMS which seems to be happening.

That’s unfortunately not a real 404 page. It must be a relative page like

ErrorDocument 404 /404error/index.html

Which could, in return, lead to incorrect displaying of the page. Depends on the theme…

Thank you for the advice Jannis. I’ll revisit once I’ve finished what I’m doing at the moment.

If you use empty image placeholders, that’s the way it works. And also the way gallery stack is able to identify if the image is available/set or not.

Thank you Webdeersign for chipping in on this.

The missing images are in fact place markers for the client to add future images. On the associated easy CMS admin page, which she will have access to, there are upload symbols for her to drag and drop additional images. This seemed the simplest way for a non-IT person to manage additions, thus my decision to use Easy CMS.

At the moment the actual live site is set up using Armadillo but it has proved too complex for her to operate, thus the move to Easy CMS. I would need to research further the drop zone idea but bear in mind that Easy CMS is also allowing text updating. I need to keep things as simple as possible from the end user’s perspective.

Bob

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I have used EasyCMS for similar applications and now favour the drop zone approach. Let’s just say I haven’t had any issues with using a drop zone and clients seem to grasp the concept easier than a custom made admin page.

I created a Project that used such a system - Webdeersign Project 22 for SOURCE, and while not a gallery, all images text, pdf file and images are dropped into a zone and the images could easily be displayed with Gallery3’s load from a folder feature. Let me know if you want the password for the admin page to see how it works.

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Thank you for the additional information. You will have guessed that I’m not a pro designer and having bought Easy CMS and more or less got my head around how it works, I’m a bit reluctant to change course at this point.

Although I haven’t looked at the detail of the drop zone approach all I can say is that the existing live site, which is based on Armadillo, is effectively a folder-based approach and I’m afraid it has been shown to be too complicated. From what you’ve described I’m sure that drop zone is probably simpler but I think I am going to stick with what I’ve got. I’ve mirrored each page with an equivalent admin page and feel that for the end user switching between two superficially similar pages is as basic as it gets, while completely removing the need to work at folder level.

Thank you, however, for your suggestion and taking an interest in my problem.

Regards,

Bob

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