jAlbum/Settings/Advanced/Widgets

This section lets you choose what Widgets (if any) to use. Widgets are small JavaScript code snippets that make your album interactive. To its nature, jAlbum albums are static html pages, but receive dynamic aspects like search and filter-by-keyword by the use of JavaScript and by interacting with other services (PayPal's shopping cart for instance).

jAlbum Widgets interact with the jalbum.net servers in order to provide functionality like visitor counters and visitor commenting. You need a jalbum.net account and be signed-in to the jAlbum application in order to use Widgets. You sign in with the same user name and password as for jAlbum.net.

You can use Widgets even if you host your album on your own server, but it must be listed on your jalbum.net profile page. jAlbum takes care of this if you're signed into the jAlbum application when you upload the album, but you can also manually add albums to your profile page using your web browser. Go to your profile page and choose ‘Albums’ from the drop- down menu below your username, then click on the button ‘Add external album’ and then enter the full URL to your album. Finally, select a thumbnail image to represent it in your Albums listing.

The widgets should now be enabled and you can select the widgets to include in your album by checking the tick box to the right of the widget name. If you enable a widget and then disable sometime later, you will get a notification message saying widgets have been changed and your album needs updating before you can see the effect.

1. About: The About widget shows information about you, the person behind the photos, including your jalbum.net user image and information (such as description, location and a link to your homepage). It also shows your albums description, when it was published and what skin it was built with. The About widget also lists thumbnails to your other albums for easy browsing.
2. Comments: Let visitors comment on your album and on each image. Get feedback and connect with your visitors. You can also comment as a guest so you don't need a jAlbum account to comment on an album.
3. Counter: The Counter widget displays how many total visits you've got on your album and how many visited each image. Note, even if you just refresh the page, it will be counted as one more visit.
4. Share: The Share widget make it easy for visitors to share your album on their favorite social networking site (such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace), blogs or e-mail to friends.
5. More about widgets: You can find out more about widgets by clicking on the link More about widgets, which will take you to jAlbum.net’s widgets page.
6. Save as default: Makes the selected widgets to the default setting for the upcoming albums.

The result

Widgets cannot be previewed locally, to see them you must look at your published album. At the bottom of each page you will see the widget bar, by default in its minimized state. Clicking on the different sections will open up that widget. Widgets can be customized, you do need to know javascript, CSS, HTML and how to edit jAlbum templates! An example of a custom color scheme is shown.