April 5th, 2008: Avatar Gallery 2 is in its first beta (so please...expect issues). The beta is fully functional, but expires May 5th. Major advances include: 1. The use of Tables to present the avatars and user data (AG 1 used pure CSS, which became a problem due to the way different browsers handle floats). You can quickly switch between various table styles in the admin backend. Some styles have a nice 3d effect, while others are more minimal (see the Table Styles Demo menu at right). You can, of course, get into the css for each of these styles and change it to whatever you want. 2. The incorporation of the Highslide thumbnail viewer, along with MooTools BubbleTips. Now you can choose between MooTools BubbleTips and Highslide when presenting popups over your avatars. Data fields you select in the admin backend can be programmed to appear beside the thumbnails on the web page or inside popups. Highslide will also be a welcome addition to web designers who make extensive use of jQuery in their templates or modules. Highslide and jQuery do not conflict. MooTools and jQuery do. 3. The ability to resample thumbnails to any dimensions, eliminating the issues of unequal thumbnail sizes. Previously, there was a problem with thumbnails of unequal size taking up too much horizontal or vertical space, distorting your layouts. One approach to that problem was to force thumbnails to a particular size using the HEIGHT or WIDTH option in the IMG tag, but the results were obviously pixellated and unattractive. Resampling thumbnails produces attractive results and completely eliminates the problems. 4. Development of a Query Constructor. The strength of the Avatar Gallery has always been the ability to construct your own queries and sample any cross-section of your userbase. If you wanted to display doctors in Idaho or Blondes in Asia, you could. Unfortunately, SQL proved challenging for many users, which limited the appeal of the module to SQL novices. Fortunately, Avatar Gallery 2 now includes a Query Constructor designed to open up the power of the module to users who don't know SQL. 6. Common queries like Random Users, New Users, Users Currently Online, and Authors are built into the Query Constructor. 7. Much greater ability to display "Members Like Me," that is, members similar to the logged in member in some respect. The query constructor lets you use "UserValue", then automatically finds the value for any field in the CB database and inserts that value. This lets users quickly see members in their own city or of their own profession, for example. 8. Ability to display either thumbnails or usernames or both, with attractive icons beside them. If you display only usernames, you essentially build a list of users based on your query. 9. Ability to put in Yahoo Messenger field. Shows Yahoo Messenger Online Status and launches Yahoo directly on the user's local machine when the Yahoo icon is clicked. Previous Features, retained in Beta Version 2.0. * Query your userbase in an infinite number of ways with SQL, yield precisely the members you want. * Example queries like Random users, users online, last registered users given in admin backend, ready to be customized. * Control the data fields that are echoed for each avatar and their location. * Add data fields to MooTools BubbleTips that popup when an avatar is moused over. * Multiple modules per page, all independently styleable. * Add avatar or thumbnail to BubbleTip popup. * Add links to Nick's Gallery uploaded for each avatar displayed. * Add a Send Private Message link to each avatar, * Private message link supports all popular private message components (Jim, uddeIM, Clexus, etc). * Add an online status link to each avatar. * Control the version of Mootools that drives the BubbleTip popups. The Avatar Gallery displays Community Builder (http://www.joomlapolis.com) avatars in the various module positions of your website, thus making your site much more "social networking aware." In order to make the Avatar Gallery powerful and flexible, some sophistication with SQL and CSS is assumed. Specifically, SQL is used to query your userbase, so that you can display users who are most relevant to the page content on which the Gallery appears. CSS is used to style the avatars and the data captioned for each user, both near the avatars and in Mootools BubbleTips (http://mootools.net). Once you understand some SQL, there's no need for separate modules to display latest registered users, most popular users, and so on. You can choose to display dentists in Chicago, for example, or females in Honolulu, or users with Joomlaboard Karma > 0. Install as an ordinary module, not as a CB plug in. I've entered the Avatar Gallery into this category because it's meaningless without Community Builder.