The Photium Blog

A new website feature has been added that allows a specified message to be shown to visitors when they have browsed a certain number of photos.

This can be useful for helping remind visitors how to purchase items, or to make them aware of features like the search facility or active promotions that are running.

The option can be enabled in the General gallery settings admin section. It can also be enabled on a portfolio basis via the admin page for editing portfolios.

Visitors will have the option to hide the message after they have read it and it will be automatically removed when they have added an item to their shopping cart.

The larger text boxes in the admin area can now be made to automatically grow to fit the text you are typing. This reduces the need for scrolling and should make it easier to edit text.

This feature can be enabled and disabled in the Personal details admin section.

UPDATE: This maintenance has now been completed and there were no outages.

On Wednesday 10th September between 3-4am (BST) maintenance work will be conducted on defective network equipment. Although this defective equipment is not affecting the service it does need to be replaced.

No outages are anticipated, given the redundant nature of the equipment being worked on. However, should an unexpected issue occur, websites will be without connectivity for approximately five minutes.

All care is being taken to ensure minimal interruption and although the maintenance is unlikely to be noticed or have any impact on service, we endeavour to be proactive in notifying of such maintenance.

As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Two new improvements have been made to recently introduced features. The first allows the selection of which portfolios have square thumbnails and which use the standard ones, so the whole Gallery doesn't have to use one type.

The second improvement is to the promotions feature, which allows you to provide discounts to your customers. Previously it was only possible to have site-wide promotions, now you can optionally select a portfolio for a promotion to be limited to.

A new admin option has been added to control what is displayed on the purchasing pages. It is now possible to select whether the photo enquiry form and the photo are shown, or just the purchase options.

The new option is available in the Photo sales settings admin section and is titled "Purchase page".

We're very satisfied with the amount of spam our systems are blocking each day but even a few spam messages getting through is a few too many.

So the spam protection we recently introduced to the guestbooks has been rolled out to the Contact forms, Photo enquiry forms and Photo comments.

There is also now a "Report spam" option present when viewing messages and using this will help to prevent further spam being received.

As part of ongoing improvements to the Photium website designs, all images uploaded now have a square thumbnail created at upload time. The square thumbnails can be shown on Home page and Gallery areas and can be enabled with a couple of clicks through the General gallery settings admin page. By default, regular portrait / landscape style thumbnails will be shown if this option is not enabled.

No extra work is required at the upload stage as all thumbnail generation is handled automatically by the upload systems.

A new option has been added to enable Media RSS feeds for portfolios. If you've not heard of Media RSS before, this might not mean a lot to you, but many website visitors will have software that supports Media RSS installed, such as the popular PicLens product.

When browsing portfolios on a Photium website where Media RSS is enabled, visitors with PicLens installed will be able to choose to view photos using it. The option for Media RSS feeds to be enabled / disabled is in the General gallery settings admin section.

The guestbook spam-protection facility has been further improved. This action has been taken as a result of an increased number of spam messages getting through, even though over 99% of the spam messages sent to guestbooks are being blocked.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to apologise for the few guestbook spam messages that some customers will have received in the last week or two and please delete them from your guestbook if you had any.

These anti-spam improvements will soon be implemented on other website sections that spammers target, such as photo comments and contact forms.

The very final stages of the server transfer are nearing completion. The vast majority of websites have been moved to the new improved servers. We have also set all the "username".photium.com domains to point to the new servers.

The move has taken longer than we anticipated, which we apologise for but our main goal of minimising disruption to all hosted websites has been achieved successfully.

For anyone curious, some of the benefits the new servers provide are:

• Increased processing power - So your websites load faster
• Better reliability - If hardware dies, we'll be up and running again faster
• Superior network connectivity - So pages and images download faster
• Future-proofing - The system is now set up to scale more easily