My customisation not showing in community

W.W. Webster

I must be going mad! :barb

I can find no way to select a community to which I wish to attach one of my galleries and then select either of the available options (in the gallery customisation panel, see below) that will result in visitors who navigate to my gallery through the Browse Photos function seeing MY customisation. That's why I customise my site!



I had this working correctly, but now find my settings are not working. Someone's changed something, and it's not me. Any suggestions as to how I get things back to 'normal'?

Seamus

Hi,

I found this answer, by Richw:


All you are seeing there is a theme. If the community owner has the settings at 'cobranding - no' The owner's cobranding won't be used on your gallery and you can use either 'appearance: SmugMug or community' in your galelry settings.

Try setting your gallery to 'communmity' to see how it looks, then try 'SmugMug' to see the differance.

You can use a theme if you like. In the gallery settings under 'community' select 'appearance - SmugMug'. The galleries selected them will be used.

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=779708&postcount=2

Can you try this and see if it works?

W.W. Webster

Seamus wrote: »

Rich

This is what I've done! Selected a community (Daily Photo), then tried both the SmugMug and Community options - neither displays my customisation.

Have I interpreted your reply correctly?

rainforest1155

Please see Andy's post here. The galleries assigned to the Daily Photos community won't show any customization anymore. For additional details on why the change was made, check out that thread.

W.W. Webster

Thanks Sebastian (I think!). My interpretation from speed-reading those dozens of posts, starting from the point you linked me to, is that due to some responses SmugMug has felt obliged to make to issues with "thumbs" and "ranking", user customisation has been over-ridden for this community.

That's disappointing - especially since i couldn't give a hoot about my ranking, and I studiously suppress and ignore all that sort of juvenile and egotistical nonsense as far as possible.

My problem is that what visitors to my Daily Photos-linked gallery now see is a garbled amalgam of some standard SmugMug format stuff and some of my customisation. The result is an ugly mess, almost unreadable due to some of the font and background colouring that results. If I got a pure SmugMug format and presentation I'd still be pissed, but at least the gallery would be somewhat 'professional'-looking which I've always believed is a driving principle for SmugMug.

As things stand, my only option has been to withdraw from the community. Perhaps the (seemingly endless) redevelopment of SmugMug that has been going on will overcome problems like this that likely derive from legacy technical design issues. I'm hoping!

rainforest1155

W.W. Webster wrote: »

My problem is that what visitors to my Daily Photos-linked gallery now see is a garbled amalgam of some standard SmugMug format stuff and some of my customisation. The result is an ugly mess, almost unreadable due to some of the font and background colouring that results. If I got a pure SmugMug format and presentation I'd still be pissed, but at least the gallery would be somewhat 'professional'-looking which I've always believed is a driving principle for SmugMug.

Can you show me what you mean and include a link to the gallery (galleries) where you see that so I could take a look?

W.W. Webster

rainforest1155 wrote: »

Can you show me what you mean and include a link to the gallery (galleries) where you see that so I could take a look?

Sebastian, I've moved this gallery back into the Daily Photos community. Please let me know when you've seen it, because I don't want my site displayed in this abdominal way any longer than absolutely necessary!

rainforest1155

W.W. Webster wrote: »

Sebastian, I've moved this gallery back into the Daily Photos community. Please let me know when you've seen it, because I don't want my site displayed in this abdominal way any longer than absolutely necessary!

You have html code in the gallery description and photo captions. That's not affected by the community setting and thus still is in effect. Just that it doesn't play nice with the community default look.

It looks like you could select a different theme to have the text display better. For example the white theme seems to work pretty good.

Apart from that, as far as I know there's no easy way to clean that up other than to manually edit the description and captions to remove the html code.

W.W. Webster

rainforest1155 wrote: »

Apart from that, as far as I know there's no easy way to clean that up other than to manually edit the description and captions to remove the html code.

Thanks, but that's part of my customisation!

IMHO this is an unholy mess and makes the community thing a non-starter for me! The silly part is that things have become broken over this fixation of dealing to some real or imagined problem with thumbs and ranking that is totally irrelevant to me. Is the SmugMug makeover/rearchitecting project going to sort out this stuff?

rainforest1155

W.W. Webster wrote: »

Thanks, but that's part of my customisation!

Yes, I understand that. I was just providing all the options I could come up with. You can still change the theme as per my first suggestion to help with the readability of the text for the gallery in the community.

IMHO this is an unholy mess and makes the community thing a non-starter for me! The silly part is that things have become broken over this fixation of dealing to some real or imagined problem with thumbs and ranking that is totally irrelevant to me. Is the SmugMug makeover/rearchitecting project going to sort out this stuff?

Yes, check out the new gallery style thread. Quote of Don from the first post:
"PhotoRank. Our PhotoRank algorithm has continued to evolve over time, and this is yet another one of those evolutions. The thumbs up / thumbs down metaphor is gone, and we instead rely on other signals (many of which we've always used already, some of which are new) to determine how popular a photo is. As usual, we won't disclose specifics and it's always a moving target, but this is a big change."