X3Photo Gallery Forums

Nice job on this. It's a bit unclear how the Javascript works ... I can see how you might use `<meta property="og:updated_time` to see if a specific page is updated. However, it's not clear how your Javascript knows that a menu item (like in your screenshot) knows that that the link is "NEU" ... It seems you are using some javascript that loads all the pages in the background and checks the meta tag? OK.

Dane wrote:However, og:updated_time is of course the last modified/updated date, which is not necessarily the same as the date when the gallery entry was originally uploaded or published.

True. You would need to get creative. X3 uses "og:updated_time" simply because that's the "modified time" of the folder on the server. On the other hand, if you are adding new images to the folder, then shouldn't the folder become "NEU" when there is new content and `og:updated_time` gets updated? Unfortunately, there is no "when a folder was first created" timestamp anywhere on your server, so X3 simply can't know this.

In reality, if you needed a "first created" timestamp, this would need to get stored in TXT or JSON file at the point in time when the folder gets created from the X3 panel. Otherwise, we simply don't know.

On a related note, if someone asked me to build this from scratch, I would perhaps use a PHP script to loop through the dirs, and get the date of the "oldest" file inside each dir. The oldest file would normally approximately be the earliest date the folder existed. You would then return all the data as a JSON response to javascript. Still not an optimal process, but surely more optimal than remote-loading all pages in multiple requests from javascript.

Some would argue that you should want to get the "updated time" of each dir instead of "the oldest file inside", so that you know if any of the content of the dir was updated, and it could be considered "new (content)".

For a simple solution, although it feels much less elegant, it would only take you a couple of minutes every week/month to add a class to the pages and menu items that you want to be considered as "new". Yep, not elegant, but it would allow you to have full control.

Dane wrote:Ideally, the newest images should always appear at the top of each gallery category. However, after updating some existing gallery entries, the order seems to have changed and is now mixed up.

If you are sure that you have selected sorting by DATE (descending) for the specific GALLERY, then yes it would sort images by date. The only thing that could cause some confusion, could be if one (or more) of your images contain EXIF date, while some don't. If you have a folder that is sorted incorrectly, please include a link so I can diagnose.