Converting the Forum to a Gallery Style

[Faulkner]

I know, I know - I keep talking about it. But now I'm actually ready.

I want to convert the Forum to a gallery style with these features I've mentioned before:

• Create a gallery style - instead of putting thumbnails vertically, put them in row after row;

• Make the gallery "responsive", in web language - i.e., show as many thumbs in a row that will fit on a device - "respond" to the device width. This comes out to three thumbs on a desktop computer, two on a tablet, and one on a phone;

• Present the thumbnails with their own border, regardless of whether the poster puts them inline, or not;

• Present a thumbnail for every type of object - an image, an mp4 movie, an mp3 recording, a pdf (not there yet with the latter);

• Permit the poster to attach a paragraph of text to a thumb if they want, and inter-mix text and thumbnails throughout their post;

• Scale the thumbnails to have the same width - even videos. You can always see the full size image by clicking on it, or the full size video by clicking on the "zoom up" control on the video itself;

• Always create a thumbnail, regardless of the size of the object.

Producing a thumbnail for a pdf file was not an easy trick - but I managed to hack it. And then - because some folks like to post images on the forum that are stored outside the forum - I realized that I had to deal with that, because it spoils the gallery layout. And now I've got a fix for that as well!

So, I am ready to take the plunge. It will be disruptive for a while. Thumbnails will appear with an inconsistent size; links to external images need to be modified; pdfs need to be re-uploaded to generate an icon; certain movie types need to be converted to mp4 (mov's will play with the embedded player now, finally). I've identified all the posts that will need fixups, and will start working my way through them as I watch NetFlix

After that, I'll start moving content into the Forum. I'm not T.W. SWM for nothing (The World's Slowest Webmaster)! Bear with me, I hope you like the end result.

[Faulkner]

Well, I took the plunge and converted. Can't go back now

And it seems, for the most part, to have worked. Check out the gallery style in this post. What do you think?

Still, not all the thumbnails got converted - and some images have an orientation problem. I have to look at that. And then, because images "wrap" on a line now, so does the text that follows an image! That makes for an odd effect, I have to correct that.

All told, not too bad an upgrade. I'll work on getting those things fixed, while I now start converting movies.

Ooh! Here's an even better example - Dick's "How To" on the 318 oil pump...