FBoxBot, Joomla bot for thumbnails

Initially, FBoxBot bot/plugin was inspired by the extension lightThumb. The main idea is to help the user to create easily thumbnails from any pictures, and when you click on the thumbnails a nice popup appears that show the image at its original size. So what makes this package so special ? Firstly: I've written the associated popup script, frontbox, which I wanted to be lightweight, polyvalent, reliable.

And Secondly: I made the process of creation of thumbnails easier than never: inside your favorite wysiwyg editor insert a picture, resize "manually" (see left picture), save, publish and the bot will do the remaining job for you ! But it has also some other nice features we'll discuss further ..

Remark: Don't forget to publish the bot/plugin.

Warning !: The bot is not applied to images external to your Joomla site.

About the "Rebuild Thumbs" button:

This button must be enabled in configuration settings, and is available only for (Super) Administrators and when Joomla's cache is disabled (at the bottom of each article in frontend). There's two main reasons to use this button :
You changed watermark in configuration settings, or disabled the "popup" effect for a thumbnail (and thus removed watermark).
You can, from each picture, create many thumbnails of different size. Problem is that if you edit save preview again and again an article, in order to adjust size of pictures; it's easy to end up with many unused thumbnails. The button will get rid of them.

Particular attributes

In order to take advantage of all the features of the bot, particular attributes must be integrated to the <img> tag. They all begin with the prefix "fb:" . Example:
- <img src="myimg.gif" width="50" height ="50" fb:name="myset" />
The complete list of particular attributes are: fb:name, fb:src, fb:width ,fb:height, fb:nofb (remark: with nofb the prefix fb: is facultative).

Warning! : If you use TinyMCE editor (or any derived editor), you should disable "Code Cleanup", and "Code Cleanup on startup" features, otherwise you won't be able to use these particular attributes.

Attribute nofb. Probably the most interesting attribute. Allow to disable popup and watermark associated to a particular thumbnail. Value should be "nofb". Example:
- <img src="stories/mypic.jpg" width="70" nofb="nofb" />
Attribute fb:name. Allow to make "kind of galleries", i.e next/previous actions. You have to specify to which "set" a "frontbox popup" belongs with this attribute (after parsing by the bot, this one becomes "name" parameter in the "frontbox span").
Attribute fb:src. If you resize big picture on your wysiwyg editor, it might be a pain to edit the article again ... (waiting for the big image to load). Instead you can provide to the regular src parameter a link to a "fake small picture", and set the true link in the fb:src attribute. You'll see "the fake picure" when editing, but after publishing, the bot will restore the "true picture" (warning: this one has nothing to do with the "src" attribute in the "frontbox span"). Example:
- <img src="fake. gif" width="70" fb:src="trueimg.gif" />
Attributes fb:width, fb:height. After parsing by the bot, these ones are respectively converted into width an height attributes in the "frontbox span". Not particularly interesting for pictures.

Troubleshooting

I got some mails of people complaining that the "lightbox effect" didn't work for them (despite the thumbnail was correctly generated). The problem happens because the mambot needs to load the following lines in the head of your Joomla's template, and unfortunately fail sometimes to do so:

A temporary fix would be to add these lines manually to the head of your Joomla's template. It doesn' t matter if the script is loaded twice (in term of performance or bandwith). Don't forget to replace mysite.com in the code by your actual website. In the future, I'll work in providing a better solution.

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Javascript, Please!