UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Resources and Customizing How Do I? custom tag: image thumb and large popup

Since I hate the fact that images can ruin the layout of a Forum + that while loading, the whole layout can shift about, I've created this custom tag which will display an image thumbnail (browser-resized) and links it to a large popup for that image. I was asked to share it here.

There's two parts to this. First download this:
www.straydesign.com/customers/misc/ubb-imagepopup.zip

Upload the enclosed PHP file into your root 'forum' folder. It does not need editing.

Then in control panel, go to 'content rebuilder' and add a new 'custom tag'

Enabled = yes
Show in meny = probably yes
Custom tag = imgpop
Menu description = Image popper
User prompt hint = Enter full image URL.
Matching regex = (.+?)
Resulting markup =


Where you would replace "YOURSERVER.COM/FORUM" with your own URL. (In here it would be "ubbcentral.com/forums".)

Use it on your Forum by using the Media button in your post/edit box. Or do:

I'm just fully testing this as we speak, it should work quite well, but I'll update when there's something annoying that needs a fix.

If you need a demo link, just go here:
http://www.fccuk.org/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=770874#Post770874

This seems to be more of a ubbdev type thing (addon/mod)

I'll add it there. Note I've just updated the popup window code to resize correctly in (I would guess most popular) browsers.

Isn't possible to do this with lightbox?

yes, i use lightbox and it's very simple with just adding to the class in the link

you hardly have to modify any code at all

Too bad

I've hooked this up with lightbox and it works stupendously.... however... it would be swell if it could somehow actually resize the image instead of a browser resize, but that would be a lot more in-depth and would require using ImageMagick, GD2, etc.

... and a lot of bandwidth. I actually had a version running like that, using a second PHP script which I set as the img src for the thumbnail, generating a thumbnail through that script. But I decided not to take up the traffic of running 4MB pictures straight-from-the-camera through our server.

Also proportionally resizing the image correctly is easy, but I wanted to actually resize and crop it into a 80x80 box, so that I could have a fixed thumbnail width and height (to get rid of any change of having the layout sliding around while loading the iamge), but couldn't get it 100% correct.

If anyone can come up with a PHP script that resizes the shortest side of the image to a fixed amount of pixels and crops off the longest side (centered) to the same amount, I would be happy to offer the adapted code on here.

I've left my default upload limit value of 2MB in my php.ini. I have 2MB as the limit in the board software as well since my users often upload MP3s of the music they have written. We're not a photography site, so there is no reason to have anything higher than 2MB; in fact, 2MB is still rather large for image files for my Website's purposes AFAIC.

Even with the galleries, users are still going to want to attach image files to "regular" forum posts as well. I'm hankerin' for making (or having made) something that will handle thumb-nailing on a file level and not just HTML re-sizing (which should be illegal, IMHO.)

I've never read into ImageMagick and its related scripting; maybe this will be a reason for me to.

This brings up an idear -- perhaps it would be a good thing to be able to set file-size limits based on file-type...

It's easy to script an image resizer. Does the php ini filesize limit also limit the file sizes of external images it can 'get'?

http://www.phptoys.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.46