Using Poster as a grid with pagination only

inStacks
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Hi Jannis, I’m having a bit of a photo gallery focused day!

I’m working on this page: https://www.davidmcconkey.co.uk/recentweddings/

It’s gallery library page containing loads of Galleries.

It’s present setup is lots of instances of Wills Gallary Pro stack set to display only the first image in the image folder, with each GP stack inside a Grid item using (I think) Dooboxes Grid stack.

It’s been working brilliantly, but now as the number of galleries on the page is getting high load times are getting too long.

So, the obvious option is to use a grid stack that offers pagination, and so I thought of Poster.

I wouldn’t want to use any read more links, I’d only want to use Poster for its grid abilities, plus pagination.

Do you think this would work ok? I think, so long as I don’t have a Poster item title displayed and no read more link, there would be no way for the user to “open” each Poster item. I think!

Perhaps though it’s a bit overkill to use something like Poster just as a grid with pagination?

I’m not at my RW machine at the moment, so can’t check, but Poster Light doesn’t support pagination, does it?

Cheers.

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Hi Steve, you have the best ideas 🙂 No kidding.

I just tested this. Actually it works quite well.

  • You have to set a first image in the header area, and disable title and metadata display
  • Give every Poster Item an individual title or slug
  • The image itself is “click-able”, so that you get to the detailed page
  • Add a summary area, which should be empty (!)
  • And in the main area, you are able to put a poster light stack, inside this again images
  • Enabling the inbuild lightbox, and you have IMHO a very nice page-able gallery of galleries, even without another product 😉

Wohoo: https://posterdemo.instacks.com/photogallery/ click on the first real image
Download this demo project here: inStacks Software | Poster Stack - Blog and Multi-Purpose Content Stack

Cheers, Jannis

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That’s a nice idea. Won’t work in this instance, as I need the galleries to be super fast to create (drop images into a folder on the server, add path to the PG stack,s etc), but for smaller gallery collections that a really nice solution.

I’m at my computer, and having a play, and it is kinda working…

Those top three galleries are GP stacks sitting inside Poster items. The first gallery opens as expected, it’s added to the item as a summary. The other two don’t open the gallery when clicked but the Poster item, in these the gallery stack is added as a header. So, the gallery stack needs to be added as summary not header.

But, it seems to work, just needs cleaning up.

I do need to stop the poster title being a clickable link though, or just not use it. Former would be easier and quicker. Possible?

That page is live, so I’ll have to change it back pretty soon.

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The titles are always clickable by default, so best to hide them.

Great site!

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What are your thoughts on page load speeds? Will doing things this way, using Poster for pagination, speed up the page load for the initial page?

Does the browser load everything inside Poster when the page first loads? I thinking it doesn’t?

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As soon as you have images on a page, the image size counts, and not actually in which way they are presented (the later of course also only marginal).

Rough guess: Yes

I cannot follow you. If you opening a Poster “List” / Paginated page, only that content is loaded, and not the content of the detailed pages.

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What I mean is, lets page an instance of Poster has eight pages. Are all eight pages loaded by the browser when the web page initially loads, or just the web page and the first page of Poster?

Does that make sense?

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Only the web page and the “list of summaries for the first Poster paginated page” are loaded.

Not the eight “sub pages” / details of the Poster Items.

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Brilliant, exactly what I’d hoped for.

Thanks everso much, and thanks for the other version of the idea too, I shall certainly be employing that one going forward on some other projects.

And, for what it’s worth, for others finding this thread, having now had a bit more of a play, I can confirm that the content needs to be in summary NOT header if you don’t want the Poster Item detail to open when clicked.

Poster has once again become even more versatile. Didn’t think it was going to get stretched any further than it’s already impressive list of uses, but it just keeps getting better ;-)

Edit: One final thing to add: If anyone else wants to use Poster with Wills Gallery Pro stack as I have described above, as mentioned you need to be sure to put Gallery Pro stack into Summary section of a Poster item, not the header. BUT… You MUST also check the Header option in settings, so a Header area appears, just leave it empty. If you don’t, Gallery Pro doesn’t work correctly.

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