Thursday, May 31, 2007

The Perils of Impatience and Time Zones: Clarifications on R11b Embedded Albums

OK folks -- in my rush to tell you the latest about the R11b patch and show you the new embedded picture gallery style picker in Beta, it turns out I was not 100% accurate. That means I should have waited a few hours to check with the team out in California.

I've updated the entry -- here's the correct info:

After the R11b patch fix is installed to production (midnight tonight, 5/31), here's what's going to happen with embedded photo albums:

* All new embedded galleries that you create -- photo albums that you embed in your Journal June 1 and after, will give you a choice between Classic (HTML) and Animated (Flash) styles. You choose with a round "radio"-style button; the default will be Animated and you can toggle back and forth at any time:

* Galleries that you created before May 16, 2007 (when R11b was installed) will go back to Classic (HTML) styles, with the forward/back navigation and the captions.

* Galleries you created between May 16 and May 31 will stay animated. If you want them to be Classic (HTML) style, you'll need to:

1. Edit the entry.
2. Click the round radio button that says "Classic (HTML)" style (like you see above).
3. Save your entry.

The reason why we can't automatically change the albums created during this gap period between R11b and the R11b patch is because doing so would require making a change (an invisible change, but still a change) to the content of your entries -- it's not a database change, but is more complicated and riskier and would delay the patch even more.

So again, if you embedded albums in your Journal entries between May 16 and May 31, and you want the Classic embedded album style, you'll need to change the setting manually by editing the entry and clicking the radio button to choose "Classic (HTML)" style.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, the team says there's another glitch, though it's relatively small and they didn't want to hold up the patch -- it's not a showstopper: When you go into an edit an older entry that has an embedded gallery, it will try to default to the Animated (Flash) style, even if it's currently Classic; so just make sure that before you save any edits to an older entry that has an embedded album, that you make sure that you choose "Classic" style before you hit save (you can always switch back and forth as you prefer).

The team will fix this particular glitch in an upcoming code drop.

Thanks, sorry for any inaccurate information before. -- Joe

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Horray yippeeeeeeee

Anonymous said...

Joe,

Playing around with my journal this morning everything seemed to be working precisely as you explained it vis-a-vis the picture albums. So far, so good! Also, an apology ... having had some time to digest and tinker with this a bit, I actually like the flash options. They work well for some photos and it is quite nice to have this flexible capacity at the click of a button. So, mea culpa and thanks for your patience and the updated information throughout the process.

Anonymous said...

I'm rather glad that the photos imbedded during the gap will stay as they were done, with the option to alter.  (I tried to play some during that time.)  Thanks for all of your updates and information, Joe.

Anonymous said...

TY for the update Joe!
So happy we have an option now.  :)
Have a lovely wkend.
Sugar

Anonymous said...

h