This is a maintenance update that fixes errors in the Preferences dialog, the Updates dialog and in image selection when the image contains a parent link.
In addition, 3rd party language packs are now checked for a 2.0 version number before being loaded to prevent issues with legacy language packs after upgrading from JCE 1.5 to JCE 2.0.
JCE 2.0.8 has been released. This is essentially a maintenance update but also includes new Permissions options for setting access to the JCE Admin options using Joomla! 1.7 ACL and a simplified implementaion for Joomla! 1.5 (Manager, Administrator, Super Administrator only)
The Permissions options are accessed from the Prefernces dialog which can be opened from the JCE Control Panel
The feedback on the new Image Manager Extended 2.0 has been great and work continues to improve the plugin features and stability.
This update fixes thumbnailing on upload and adds a few back-end improvements to make thumbnailing and resizing easier to use and more stable on servers with lower memory limits.
Upload Resize and Thumbnail
The Transform options in the Upload dialog have had a bit of a rework to try and make them easier to use and deal with some confusion around the use of the Proportional checkbox. This has been replaced by a chain link icon which controls how changes in the width and height fields are calculated, ie: if the chain link is unbroken, any change to the width field will result in the height field value being changed proportionately. If the link is broken, any values can be added to each field.
Regardless of the values in the Resize width and height fields, the aspect ratio of the uploaded image will always be maintained when resizing - images will not be stretched or cropped.
I should point out here that Resizing on Upload is now done using the client (your browser) on all modern browsers. It should now be possible to upload and resize large images without worrying about server memory issues.
The Thumbnail option however will crop the thumbnail image to fit within the supplied dimensions if required. You can still create thumbnails that are proportional to the uploaded image by only supplying a width or height value.
Thumbnail Editor
A minor change to the Thumbnail Editor allows you to create thumbnails by only supplying the width or height value, as with Upload Thumbnailing.
File List Icons
The Image Manager Extended has had the ability to display the file list as icons since 1.5, using either a set of dynamically created "cache" thumbnails" or a css scaled version of the original image. The cache method, which was the default action, would often caused issues on servers with low memory limits, especially when the images were large. This update adds a few changes to the improvements introduced in 2.0.
First, the Icon Cache option is disabled by default, all icons will be created using either the images associated thumbnail (if one has been created on upload or after) or a scaled version of the image. If the Icon Cache is enabled, the EXIF Thumbnail of the image, if available, will be used, otherwise an attempt will be made to create a cache thumbnail (a quick memory check is done). If this fails, or there isn't enough memory available to complete the operation, a scaled version of the image is used.
There will be a lot of improvements and tweaks done to the Image Manager Extended over the next few months as I attempt to refine and improve the usability of this popular plugin. Please submit any suggestions and requests in the Forum
The Image Manager Extended has finally been released for JCE 2.0 after a lengthy development period.
The same features of the 1.5 version are included in this release, for example:
Resizing and thumbnailing of images on upload - resizing is now done by the users browser where supported.
Creating and deleting thumbnails of images
Creating image popups
File list can be displayed as thumbnails with a slider to enlarge them.
In addition, some exciting new features have been added:
A new Thumbnail Editor for creating thumbnails from any part of the image
An Image Editor with basic image transforms - Resize, Crop and Rotate - as well as a set of effects to apply to images such as Grayscale, Sepia, Colour Boost / Fade. The Image Editor uses HTML5 Canvas for all transforms and effects. No waiting for the effect to be applied and no server memory limits! (requires Firefox 3.6, 4 or 5, Safari 5, Chrome 10+, Opera 10+, IE9+)
Insert Multiple Images, including the ability to change the order the images will be inserted in with drag&drop. Popups can be created on multiple images too! (the Image Editor popups above were created with this method)
The Image Manager Extended 2.0 is only available to subscribers so if you haven't yet purchased a subscription....Subscribe Now
Please note that the documentation for Image Manager Extended 2.0 has not yet been updated. This will be done over the next few weeks with some video tutorials to follow.