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  • 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.
      • 3749
      • 24,544 Posts
      Quote from: alanpich at Oct 07, 2013, 07:54 AM
      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

      That seems to be the story of my life as a MODX extra developer. wink

      On one of my extras, I spent a full year with it "almost" ready to release. It's about six months for the one I'm working on now.

      The worst thing is that as soon as you release it, you'll think of at least three new features it should have. wink

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      • Quote from: alanpich at Oct 07, 2013, 07:54 AM
        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.

        Yeah, unless you're using some fancy interpolation algorithm, scaling them up is dumb. The file gets bigger but the image quality doesn't get any better. If you have to do it, I think it's better just to use CSS to make the browser scale it up. It still doesn't look good, but at least you win on transfer speed and bandwidth usage.

        That said, I suppose you should at least allow undersized images (lord knows clients love them), and it'd be handy for them to be cropped to the selected aspect ratio, just not interpolated.

        Your other ideas sound good!
          Extras :: pThumbResizerimageSlimsetPlaceholders
          • 42766
          • 47 Posts
          Hi Alan,

          Firstly - thank you for TVImage+! The ability it gives me to hand my clients a DIY image solution is simply unparalleled.

          I came across a glitch in version 2.2.0-beta which I pulled down from the Repo. It appears it would affect those wanting to use a custom media source with PhpThumbsUp.

          I've fixed it and hit GitHub to submit the change, but it appears that project is dead-and-buried on GitHub with a view to 3.0 arriving at some point instead.

          For the benefit of anyone experiencing broken images using custom media sources with PhpThumbsUp, you'll need to edit /core/components/tvimageplus/lib/CropEngines/PhpThumbsUp.php and change line 80 from

          $imgPath = $data->sourceImg->src;

          to
          $imgPath = $source->getBaseUrl() . $data->sourceImg->src;


          Hope that's helpful to someone!