Nice permalinks

[GoogleCodeExporter]

At the moment we get permalinks like this:
/nggallery/page-8/album-1/gallery-3/
where the page with id=8 is the page containing the album shortcode.

To get nice permalinks like
/nature/animals/birds/sparrow
 (1)     (2)    (3)   (4)
where (1) is an album
      (2) is a subalbum
      (3) is a gallery
      (4) is a specific picture
we have to create a page in wordpress for each album/subalbum/gallery, give
it a title corresponding to the album/subalbum/gallery title (which is
already in the DB), fill them with the appropriate shortcode (you have to
know the ID of the album/gallery for that!) and link the album/gallery to
that page. (4) is even not achieved by this.

What do you think is necessary to get nice permalinks with creating only a
single page containing the top album? Probably nggRewrite has to be
rewritten (sic!) and would have to incorporate a lot of dynamically
generated rewrite rules based on database content (gallery titles etc.).
Sounds complicated to me, as I do not know a thing about how wordpress
handles that...

What do you think about that, Alex?

Original issue reported on code.google.com by prollius@gmail.com on 26 Aug 2009 at 10:10

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The main issue is the database queries which increases currently if we use the
current rewrite rules and fetch the gallery/album name for better permalinks. 
My idea
is to rewrite the ngg-db class and use a object cache so that the database will 
not
be again and again hit for the same request.

If I have rewritten this part, then nggRewrite can simply fetch the slug of a 
gallery
or album  

Original comment by alex.cologne on 29 Aug 2009 at 7:56

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Are you about to rewrite ngg-db, or is it just an idea?

Original comment by prollius@gmail.com on 31 Aug 2009 at 12:18

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Yes, I started to use wp_object_cache, but this need more time. The rewrite 
rules are
(for me) not that easy to implement. Many,many Regex and special behaviors in 
the WP
internal rewrite system...

Original comment by alex.cologne on 1 Sep 2009 at 6:59

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any updates on the permalinks?

Original comment by sybold on 13 Jan 2010 at 7:06

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Yes please post an update on this because the current link suck bigtime :)

Original comment by i...@abcleaning.nl on 20 Jan 2010 at 10:24

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Agreed, is there any updated news to this feature? 

Original comment by suh...@gmail.com on 6 Mar 2010 at 7:14

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I am already in process of creating the plugin for this feature, but I am 
willing to 
implement it direct into the plugin. Is it possible to join the team (I know it 
is one 
man ride)?

Thank you.
Btw I also have ideas for improvements on other areas of plugin, and also 
willing to 
implement them.

Original comment by mario.ko...@gmail.com on 29 Apr 2010 at 9:20

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Yes you can contribute, contact me by mail or attach patch files

Original comment by alex.cologne on 30 Apr 2010 at 6:23

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this would facilitate adding commenting functionality on individual photos, 
which
would be amazing. Mario, could you notify us as soon as you have something? 
even if
its in alpha, as this would be enormously helpful to me.

Original comment by igoo...@googlemail.com on 17 May 2010 at 11:22

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This evolution in the permalinks would be fantastic! I'll be sure to keep an 
eye out for it. Thank you for your ongoing development on this plugin, it's 
greatly appreciated.

Original comment by iverson....@gmail.com on 10 Jun 2010 at 9:14

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[deleted comment]

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Thanks for all your hard work on this! I'm ready for the permalinks as I have a 
client that really needs it to run his site properly. Please notify me as soon 
as you get it up and going. Much appreciated guys!

Original comment by 68k...@gmail.com on 15 Jun 2010 at 5:40

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Thank you for your work ! I wait for this new permalink

Original comment by easyso...@gmail.com on 18 Jun 2010 at 10:56

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Just to let people know that I have also developed full working code for nice 
SEO-friendly permalinks for NextGEN.

I'm planning to have them rolled up into a distributable "mod" style package in 
the next few days - the code at the moment consists of hacks made to a raw 
install of NextGEN, so no configuration or options.

I'll update when I have patch files to contribute, but wanted to keep people 
here informed :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Jul 2010 at 1:16

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Sounds good. Contact me if you have any questions about the code

Original comment by alex.cologne on 6 Jul 2010 at 7:45

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I've attached a tar.gz of the complete NextGEN archive.

Changed files are:
nggfunctions.php
lib/ngg-db.php
lib/rewrite.php

There are several code changes, so I won't list all changes here. After 
replacing the files, log into your wp-admin console and go to your NextGEN 
options. Click on the "Permalinks" tab, and the options should be 
self-explanatory.

Note to anyone upgrading to this patch, obviously there is a risk in using this 
as it I haven't tested on anything other than my own website. Remember to 
backup your current nextgen-gallery plugin folder, as well as any customised 
CSS files you have.

Alex - I can provide .patch or diffs to either ngg-1.5.5 or the SVN development 
trunk if you need them.

Demo gallery is here: http://www.cwatson.org/gallery

WP version: 3.0
NGG version: 1.5.5-cw

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Jul 2010 at 6:42

Attachments:

• nextgen-1.5.5-cw.tar.gz

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi, thank you for your plugin. i've tested it on my page and unfortunately it 
doesn't work in my case :(
I think the problem is that i'm using the image browser and not the js viewer. 
If you want to have a look at my setup you can see it at http://www.gamue.de

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 6 Jul 2010 at 8:12

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Johannes - Try editing line 265 on lib/rewrite.php and change "page" to "image" 
- I believe this is an error in the original rewrite.php because my rules are 
copy-pasted from the originals.

Hope that works :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Jul 2010 at 8:23

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Also, another minor glitch, I managed to leave the development init hook for 
rewrites enabled (oops!), so comment out line 32 (if you're unfamiliar with 
code, add // before the command "add_action(......".

I've attached a replacement set of files :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Jul 2010 at 8:29

Attachments:

• nextgen-gallery.zip
• nextgen-gallery.tar.gz

[GoogleCodeExporter]

thanks, that change make it work!

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 6 Jul 2010 at 8:32

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I had some troubles to review your changes as you have a Mac/Windows Double 
spacing issue included (EOL Conversion), so I hope know I get all your changes 
into one patch file as attached.

I can see you changed four files :

nggfunctions.php
lib/ngg-db.php
lib/rewrite.php
admin/settings.php

Correct ?

Original comment by alex.cologne on 7 Jul 2010 at 8:34

• Changed state: Accepted

Attachments:

• permalinks.patch

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi Alex,
Yep, that patch file looks right. Apologies for the characterset problems, I'll 
look into them now and replace the attached archives as soon as I have fixed it 
:)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 8:47

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From my first review it look really good, I need to check all combinations 
(over the time I have included a terrible amount of combinations between 
album/subalbum/gallery/image etc...) and as well I must look if this not open 
any SQL injection (the main reasons why I handle till now integers instead 
strings).

Your solution has one limitation (from that what I can see) it just handle one 
gallery landing page, some user include galleries into their post and there it 
will not work.

Original comment by alex.cologne on 7 Jul 2010 at 8:54

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks Alex,
I am aware of the problem with posts vs pages, but I think this is the main way 
that people expect a gallery to function.

I have made a test blog post on my own website here: 
http://www.cwatson.org/2010/07/07/test-gallery-post/

It seems like a minor problem, so hopefully I'll look into it today and have a 
fix for you :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 9:17

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If I click on a gallery at your test page i'll get a 404, i think that's the 
error you're talking about? in my test setup yesterday, i have a page with an 
album inside which worked. one think i was wondering about is that the album 
number isn't changed to a name. It's the same in your example 
"http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/post/test-gallery-post/7/saxon_-_london_astoria_
-_april_2006/" (after test-gallery-post is the number). do you think it's 
possible to change this number into the galleryname or isn't it?
another thing which i saw is that the slug is required, could it be optional or 
not?

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 9:24

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I think this can be solved, I'm out now and will deeper test this tomorrow. 
Thanks for all your input

Original comment by alex.cologne on 7 Jul 2010 at 9:28

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Seems to be fixed now, I originally didn't include the post links in the SEO 
array in lib/rewrite.php, so they weren't being parsed - and I also missed one 
line out of the nggfunctions.php file when dealing with posts.

I've attached both changed files :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 10:01

Attachments:

• nggfunctions.php
• rewrite.php

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Looks like there's another problem with some characters, if you want to see the 
"Iron Maiden - Earl's Court - December 2006" Gallery it won't work

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 10:05

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Should also mention that the permalink structure needs to be manually updated 
to take into account the new rules in rewrite.php

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 10:05

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[deleted comment]

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Lines 348 and 349 respectively of nggfunctions.php become:

$gallery = str_replace("_"," 
",htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($gallery),ENT_QUOTES));
$album = str_replace("_"," ",htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($album),ENT_QUOTES));

Problem was just the single quote in the URL not being translated to ' (it's 
XHTML ASCII code).

Alex - as far as I can tell it should be fairly OK for XSS and SQL injection, 
as $wpdb->prepare will escape the SQL for you :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 10:41

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Hi maidenfan,
I've just tested the new version and get the following error if i use the last 
nextgen-gallery.zip archive you've uploaded and get the following error: 

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output 
started at [..path..]\wp-content\plugins\nextgen-gallery\lib\core.php:931) in 
[..path..]\wp-includes\pluggable.php on line 890

so i've used the archive from yesterday and just replaced the nggfunctions.php 
and rewrite.php files.
As i mentioned before i'm using the image browser on my page, now i'm getting a 
404 error again, the path is e.g. 
http://.../photos/testalbum/testgallery/image/1. For a test i've reverted the 
page-to-image change, and then it works. So if I use 
http://.../photos/testalbum/testgallery/page/1/ the image will be displayed. 
It's a little bit confusing...

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 8:48

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I've also found a problem with german umlauts like ä,ö and ü. I think some 
other special characters (like french ones) could also be effect an error.
A gallery called "täst" is transformed into the follwing url 
http://localhost/wordpress/photos/testalbum/t%EF%BF%BDst/ after clicking it i 
get a "gallery not found"-message. The correct UTF-8 code for ä would be %C3%A4

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 7 Jul 2010 at 8:58

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Hi Johannes,
I've not got any errors from core.php, I think there's a bit of confusion about 
the "current" version of files, so I have included a complete set here, and 
will delete the rest.

I've posted files, complete archives and manual line-edits in this discussion 
thread so it may be confusing!

After replacing the files, refresh your permalink structure and thinks should 
be all working (I hope!). 

I've also tested the code with special characters, and have a demo gallery here:

http://www.cwatson.org/gallery/we_will_%22r%C3%B6ck%27_you/s%C3%B6me_g%C3%A3ller
y_with_l%C3%B6ts_%C3%B6f_specialchars_&_o%27er_%22stuffs%22/

Hopefully that URL is enough of a proof of concept ;)

Alex,
Not sure what the timescale is for the next NGG release, but if you could 
re-compile the patch from the changed fileset. Any other bugfixes I do here 
will detail what line/file to replace and the new lines(s) - hopefully this 
will make things easier to follow :)

Thanks,
Craig

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 8 Jul 2010 at 8:30

Attachments:

• nextgen-changed.zip
• nextgen-gallery.zip

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Attached the new patch file from the latest version. (it's really hot here, so 
have didn't work that much... waiting for a cool down :-)

@Craig

There is no current time scale, I'm working on some other topics (see 
changelog.txt) and when I feel a version is stable, I will release it. As I can 
see from your concept I have a design failure in my plugin : Album and gallery 
didn't have a unique "slug" which we need to build up a correct SEO friendly 
URL. As we can see from the umlauts issue the gallery name needs to "sanitize" 
from special chars in the same way as WordPress sanitize a blog title for the 
permalinks.

Nevertheless your idea is the best we can have for now, so I will test it and 
let you know if I will add it to core. Thanks for all the work. 

Original comment by alex.cologne on 9 Jul 2010 at 2:13

Attachments:

• permalinks.patch

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi Craig,
thanks for the new file set now the header from core.php disappeared. I still 
have the umlaut problem, but maybe there's a misconfiguration i've done, i will 
have a look at it.
But if i click on an image (using image browser) i get the following error, 
could you please test it? if it works i'll delete my local environment and 
create a new one.

URL is: http://localhost/wordpress/photos/testalbum/testgallery/image/2
Error is:
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output 
started at ...\wp-content\plugins\nextgen-gallery\lib\ngg-db.php:1575) in 
...\wp-includes\pluggable.php  on line 890

Thanks for your amazing work, can't wait to use it online.

Original comment by johannes...@gmail.com on 10 Jul 2010 at 10:29

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Alex and Johannes:
I'm pretty busy for the next week or so with freelance web design projects, so 
my time is fairly limited.

I think the best thing to do is go back and re-develop the SEO fix properly, 
including a "sanitised" gallery/album title database field to make things a lot 
easier.

If Alex can implement this before I have the chance to look at it, that would 
be brilliant, but if not then I'll look at it when I can (hopefully week 
beginning 19th July). I'll hopefully do a "complete" solution to save Alex the 
trouble :)

We'll get there in the end :)
Craig

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 12 Jul 2010 at 6:55

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There is no rush... it's a hot summer here and I'm working on the plugin not 
very often, so take your time and enjoy the summer :-)

Original comment by alex.cologne on 13 Jul 2010 at 6:49

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Alex,
Sorry it's taken a while, a lot of things have been happening recently!!

I should be able to take a look at NextGEN again this week. What I plan to do 
is do a fresh set of patches against the current trunk versions of NextGEN, and 
include database schema changes.

I'll hopefully make some changes to the update mechanism to take into account 
the changes.

I think it's safer to just treat this as a NextGEN code submission rather than 
a manual patch. Hopefully then it's just a case of testing the changes and then 
releasing them as part of NextGEN :)

Cheers,
Craig

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 4 Sep 2010 at 3:29

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take your time, I will release in two weeks V1.6.0, then I will start the next 
cycle and we can look into this. Thanks for all your help !

Original comment by alex.cologne on 4 Sep 2010 at 4:59

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Alex,
Is there chance in getting this into 1.6.0? I'm pretty much done with the 
changes now - they took me a lot less time than I planned!

I'll post up a patch file against the current trunk when I've verified it all 
works. I've done some minor tweaks to enable SEO permalinks of individual 
images - something people have been asking for I think.

One minor thing I need to correct is getting the information into the XHTML 
<title> tag, but that shouldn't take too long :)

If it's possible to integrate the code and release it as 1.6.0b4, that would be 
cool :)

Cheers,
Craig

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 5 Sep 2010 at 8:17

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I don't prefer this : I'm a one-man-show and need to test all features and 
functions as good as possible, V1.6.0 test cycle is finished and I wait now one 
week until I release this version, right after the release we can start the 
next version and include your patches, so there is enough time to test it...  

Original comment by alex.cologne on 5 Sep 2010 at 8:24

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No problem, I appreciate that testing is a very big task - I've tried to test 
my code as much as possible, and it does seem to work as intended with no 
side-effects.

I'll keep working anyway - I'm away from 17th September for 2 weeks (holiday!) 
so ideally things will be tested enough to integrate then :)

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 5 Sep 2010 at 8:37

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Hi Alex,
I've just finished the work on the Permalinks - a working example is online 
here: http://www.cwatson.org

I've attached both a zip archive of NextGEN (1.6.0b3 plus my changes) and a 
patch file taken from the current SVN trunk.

I'm not sure about whether it's safe to distribute the patched files, given the 
nature of the database updates, but I've changed the database version to 
1.5.9-cw (pretty much 1.6.0 but with my own modifications) so that it doesn't 
interfere with any 1.6.0 updates if it is applied. If this isn't suitable, let 
me know and I'll change it.

There does seem to be a bug within lib/ngg-db.php within the find_image 
function. When embedding an ImageBrowser into a post, the WP cache throws up 
some errors about incorrect types (wish I had an example now!). Strangely, this 
doesn't happen when using ImageBrowsers within a page, and it solvable by 
commenting out the caching lines within find_image.

I appreciate if you're busy with 1.6.0 at the moment, though :)

Craig

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Sep 2010 at 1:20

Attachments:

• nextgen-gallery.zip
• permalinks.patch

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Take a quick view into your patch and it looks fine, I would recommend some 
minor tweaks for the db schema :

nggallery contain already "name" and is normally not used (just as shortcode 
tag) so this should be used as sanitize slug, same can be done for nggalbum -> 
"name" can be sanitize and must be unique, for nggpicture I suggest to name the 
field "image_name" instead "alttext_sane", would be more descriptive

In two weeks I will start on this, wish you some nice holidays. Thanks for your 
contribution !

Original comment by alex.cologne on 6 Sep 2010 at 7:06

• Added labels: Milestone-V1.7

[GoogleCodeExporter]

One issue about sanitize_title($alttext), how do you ensure that it's unique ? 
A user can use as alttext several times the same descriptive text (ie. 'Summer 
2010')...

Original comment by alex.cologne on 6 Sep 2010 at 7:12

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I'm not sure about using the nggallery "name" as the sanitized version, the 
title could be more descriptive and user-customisable so maybe it's best to 
keep the title as the slug? This way the user can change it and not affect any 
existing shortcodes.

The database schema changes otherwise look good, I'd suggest prepending the PID 
to the alttext, so "Summer 2010" becomes "123-summer-2010". This would also 
need some tweaking on the rewrite side to just send the "123" part to NextGEN 
to find.

Just out of curiosity, is there ETA on v1.7?

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Sep 2010 at 12:00

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V1.7.0 will released shortly before WordPress 3.1 as some functions now 
deprecated. 

I will look in 2-3 weeks for the unique slug process, WordPress must have a 
inbuilt function already as the slug/permalink for a post is always unique.

Original comment by alex.cologne on 6 Sep 2010 at 7:49

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The post/page permalink uses the sanitize_title() function, which is the same 
function I've used when sanitizing the NextGEN data.

The reason I chose the gallery's "title" attribute to be the permalinked one is 
that it's user-configurable, and it matches the displayed data - an SEO point 
really - rather than the shortcode.

When the user changes the gallery's title, the permalink should change, in the 
same way as a post/page. If the title already exists, WP appends a number to 
the end of it, so perhaps this is a solution to the uniqueness problem?

Another solution could be to make the title/name/whatever a key (I know that 
MySQL can handle multiple primary keys, not sure about other DBMS')?

Original comment by craig.watson@youdevise.com on 6 Sep 2010 at 8:11

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Correct, sanitize_title() is used in combination with a counter, so the 
function need to be extended in the same way as you have written... think a db 
lookup before saving is needed in this case 

Original comment by alex.cologne on 6 Sep 2010 at 8:17