Media / album view widgets

Davyc

Well-known member
With the introduction of boxes as widgets is it possible to turn off these:

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Not so much the 'Media Information' but the others which may or may not be of interest depending on the type of usage.

With thanks.
 
Upvote 1
Also, it would be nice if those boxes (almost widgets) could be arranged in tabs & only load when the tab is clicked by the user. I assume that the most important widget would be the 'share' widget. The other two widgets could be hidden in tabs.
 
Also, it would be nice if those boxes (almost widgets) could be arranged in tabs & only load when the tab is clicked by the user. I assume that the most important widget would be the 'share' widget. The other two widgets could be hidden in tabs.

I think it depends on your usage as to which is the most important.

I think the Media information is kind of key (user, date, views, comments, rating) and our users love to see image metadata - so that's almost as important to us.

I like to be able to view that information at a glance rather than having it hidden behind tabs.
 
I think the Media information is kind of key
I agree, for me at least it's the most important one.

I assume that the most important widget would be the 'share' widget.
I don't know about your site, or indeed others, but the share widget doesn't get much use on my site.

Personally I think it's far too big, mainly because of the 4 link boxes for copying the different kinds of URLs for sharing. This really needs to be smaller in some way or hidden (eg collapsible) until someone actually wants to get one of these URLs.
 
Personally I think it's far too big, mainly because of the 4 link boxes for copying the different kinds of URLs for sharing. This really needs to be smaller in some way or hidden (eg collapsible) until someone actually wants to get one of these URLs.
I do agree, but in many ways it's more hidden now than it was. The redesign of the media view has very much emphasised focus towards the media itself, so there's no sidebar next to it, there's no title or buttons at the top pushing the media even further down, the height is now limited so that a full image can be seen without scrolling (it does often mean an image isn't as wide, but I think being able to see an image in its entirety is more important) and all of this has now pushed anything that isn't 100% critical to below the media.

I think the position the share sidebar is in now, is people are really only going to see it / find it if they go looking for it so in many ways I think it's hidden enough without making it totally undiscoverable.

That said, if we do make it a widget then you could switch it off or modify the template to remove the bits you don't want (or you could do that anyway). If we go down that route, I'll add an option to the widget to remove the share inputs entirely (people do use these so I think it's reasonable to keep them on by default).
 
Personally I think it's far too big, mainly because of the 4 link boxes for copying the different kinds of URLs for sharing. This really needs to be smaller in some way or hidden (eg collapsible) until someone actually wants to get one of these URLs.

With the clickable 'Link' button after 'Email', the first text box 'Copy image link' does seem redundant now. Removing this would reduce the number of text boxes from 4 down to 3.
 
No, they're different.

The clickable link icon will share the URL of the page. The box below it is the direct URL of the image itself. We have actually already removed one since XFMG 1 (the clickable link icon replaced it). There used to be 5, now there's 4.
 
@Chris D don't get me wrong, the redesign of XFMG 2.0 is a great improvement on XFMG 1.x and the increased focus on the media is much appreciated. Yes, the sidebar has gone and the share sidebar is indeed now below the media but I still think it looks far too big in its current format due to the URL boxes. This is particularly noticeable on desktop when there are few/no comments and it creates a large empty area below the comment editor:

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If there was some way to hide these (e.g. collapsible clickable section or a Copy Code/URL link that brought up a pop-up with the URLs in to copy) then it would make the block smaller, thus reducing the page height and that empty space.
 
@Martok. If he removes the Media information box, it will look more in line without having comments and it makes no sense to have this box if you ask me, because the long box above literally serves the same purpose. Just move comment/view count into it and it has all it needs.

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Stars and likes... IPB did that aswell, but they already thought it as questionable themself, after I poked a bit around there. But who actually uses likes and star rating? It serves the same purpose. IMO remove like and put stars in that place or give people the option to choose between both options, but to have both at the same time makes no sense. With likes in place probably everyone will ignore the star rating anyway, because it`s easier to press a like button than to think about how many stars a picture deserves.
 
There's no point in a lengthy discussion about which approach is best as everyone will have an opinion that suits themselves and their users. Let us just give some consideration to the widget approach, in which case you can just disable the widgets you don't want, or re-order them as you see fit.

Even if we don't go down that approach, the adjustments people want to suit them are just a template edit away, in the xfmg_media_view template.

We do actually display a traditional sidebar on the page (next to the image) in the event that there is no permission to view comments. So there's two places in the template to change.

Easiest way to see this is to search for:
HTML:
<xf:macro name="info_sidebar" arg-mediaItem="{$mediaItem}" />
This will appear twice, you can move it or remove it.
 
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