In order to unlock any sigplus functionality, the plug-in has to be enabled. After installation in the administration back-end, open Extensions/Plugin manager and click Content - Image gallery - sigplus in the list. On the page that appears, you find a radio button Enabled in the panel Details.
By typing {gallery}imagefolder{/gallery} into the body of an article (content item), the plug-in will automatically produce a preview of all the images in the folder joomlaroot/images/stories/imagefolder. Clicking on any of the thumbnails will bring up a pop-up window. For example, type the following into the body of an article:
{gallery}fruit{/gallery}
The result will look as follows:
As shown in the example, only a fixed number of images are shown at a time, and you may use navigation links to slide to the next set of images, which is practical if the image gallery contains many images. The type of image slider to use can be configured in the administration back-end.
If you want no image slider but to display all image previews at once, simply activate flow layout. (If you have sigplus version 1.2.x, you can achieve this by setting Thumbnail count to 0.) The result is as follows:
To attach labels to images in a gallery, the steps to take are as follows. Suppose you would like to add labels for the image gallery folder fruit inside the folder stories with files cherry.jpg, pears.jpg and strawberry.jpg you have already uploaded with Media Manager in the Joomla administration back-end.
- Create a text file called labels.txt on your computer.
- For each image, add a caption line with a vertical bar separating file name, short title and longer description. In our example, this means labels.txt could have the following contents:
cherry.jpg|Cherry|The first item in my fruit collection. pears.jpg|Pears|The second item in my fruit collection. strawberry.jpg|Strawberry|The third item in my fruit collection.
- Save the file.
For text that contains non-English characters, users should save their file with UTF-8 encoding. If you have used Notepad (shipped with Windows) to edit the file, choose Save as… from the File menu, and set Encoding at the bottom of the pop-up dialog box to UTF-8. - Use the Media manager (or an FTP client) to upload labels.txt to the folder fruit where your images are.
- Type {gallery}fruit{/gallery} into an article and see how the captions are shown when you click the images.