Two questions about Maxigallery

Hi everybody,

I’ve just installed Maxigallery on a client’s site. I’ve not used it before and I have two questions. (I’m using the latest version of MODx on a LAMP box.)

1. The client wants to upload his own thumbnails and not use the ones created by Maxigallery. This doesn’t appear to be an option. Is it? If not, I guess I can have the client just upload new thumbs over the auto-generated ones, or make a page where he can do that.

2. I’m using the "slimbox" option in MG. This works great for users but I don’t think it’s as good for SEO by default as it could be. The problem I see is that the thumbs are linked to the full-size image files themselves, but they should be linked to standalone pages that contain the title/description for the image. Otherwise, I don’t think the search engines can index the pics’ descriptions. So, I’m thinking of changing the link to point to a page that does this. It’s a waste to have a place to put descriptions if they can’t be indexed. Has anyone made this modification before? If so, can you give me any clues about the simplest way to do it? I haven’t got into MG’s code yet so I’m wondering if this can be accomplished just by editing one of MG’s template files.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Quote from: ClickScience at Aug 15, 2009, 02:40 PM

1. The client wants to upload his own thumbnails and not use the ones created by Maxigallery. This doesn’t appear to be an option. Is it? If not, I guess I can have the client just upload new thumbs over the auto-generated ones, or make a page where he can do that.

Yea, No option to do this. You need to replace the auto-generated thumbnail afterwards.

Quote from: ClickScience at Aug 15, 2009, 02:40 PM

2. I’m using the "slimbox" option in MG. This works great for users but I don’t think it’s as good for SEO by default as it could be. The problem I see is that the thumbs are linked to the full-size image files themselves, but they should be linked to standalone pages that contain the title/description for the image. Otherwise, I don’t think the search engines can index the pics’ descriptions. So, I’m thinking of changing the link to point to a page that does this.

The way slimbox works is that it checks if the link has rel="lightbox" attribute in it and if it does, it opens the link href in the lightbox. So it won’t work if you change the link to a page url. If you really want to do that, you’d need to use ThickBox or some lightbox script that can show html content. Then do a document to view a single picture. Then do a custom template to open the thickbox via url to the page that displays single picture.

Quote from: ClickScience at Aug 15, 2009, 02:40 PM

It’s a waste to have a place to put descriptions if they can’t be indexed.

The picture title / description text comes to the bottom of the lightbox. It’s a description text about the picture for visitor to see. Not a meta data field.