Hey guys, I've been (slowly) trying to prepare a new release of Image+ but every time I think I'm close to a release, I get another couple of feature requests or suddenly have a 'brilliant' idea for improvement that generally means refactoring a load of code.
To try and focus the development a bit more, and hopefully speed up the arrival of a new release, I thought I would share my roadmap on the forums and ask for any/all input from the community in the direction being taken.
I'm still not sure if the next release will constitute v2.2 or bump straight to v3.0, I guess it all depends how the feature requests pan out.
At the time of writing, the current feature requests logged on the github issue tracker (
https://github.com/alanpich/tvImagePlus/issues?milestone=1&state=open) are as follows:
Option to set TV as 'required'
This would force a user to populate the TV before they could save the resource. Regular TVs offer this, and so should Image+
Allow images upscaling
Personally I think this is a fools' errand and very bad practice. One of the core drivers behind the original Image+ development was to prevent users from selecting inappropriate images for use in a page. I have, however, received requests from several people to allow the use of images that are blatently too small, and have the server up-scale them to fit the required dimensions.
Separate cropped image cache from MODX cache
After using Image+ in production on a site with 30+ unique images
on each page, I've found that re-generating all thumbs on every page load takes
too bloody long quite a while, and has a serious detrimental effect on page load time. To combat this, I am thinking about the following changes (any comments/suggestions welcome):
- Move the cached image location outside of the MODX cache to prevent it being cleared on system cache refresh
- Generate thumbs either on doc save, or via ajax when an image is selected. This means that all load is placed on the manager session rather than the end user.
- Generating all thumbs in the manager would mean that the native phpThumb MODX extension could be used, removing dependencies for phpThumbOf/phpThumbsUp/pThumb etc.