Gallery 1.6 Release Candidate 1

Submitted by ckdake on Tue, 2008-08-05 17:03

After many months of refinement on the alpha versions, Gallery 1.6 Release Candidate 1 is here. This is the first of at least 2 Release Candidates before Gallery 1.6 will be release and recommended for production sites. A release candidate helps users like you test out new features and provide feedback so that the final version has as many possible issues resolved. Please notice that while this release comes with some great new features (e.g. Group Support, Captcha), it contains incompatible changes with older versions of Gallery 1.

This release introduces large changes to CSS and layout, which are incompatible with any previous Gallery 1.x installation. None of your modifications of your Gallery 1.5.x will work in Gallery 1.6! You can of course use your current albums and photos etc, but we suggest a fresh install and then port your mods over. We encourage you to try it out and report any problems you have because the more people who give us feedback, the better the final product will be. You can get Gallery 1.6-RC1 from the download page on SourceForge.

This release also includes the same security fixes as Gallery 1.5.8 so if you are using one of the Gallery 1.6 alpha releases, we highly recommend that you upgrade to Gallery 1.6-RC1 to protect your installation. While these security fixes are not in our public source code repository prior to the release, we will begin adding them to it as soon as possible once this story is posted.

Goals of Gallery 1.6

The two primary goals were HTML 4.01 compliance and easier visual customization. To do this right meant touching almost all of the Gallery code and given that some things were going to break, we decided to clean up the code in the process. Thus, the source code structure of Gallery 1.6 is very different to prior versions and Gallery 1.6 is not compatible with CSS or themes from prior versions.

If you are planning to do a fresh install, or have not done any modification to your Gallery, you can just scroll down to the new features.

Major Changes

Gallery 1.6 and all future versions of Gallery 1 are not and will not be compatible with any skins, layouts or layout modifications done for earlier versions of Gallery 1 for the following reasons:

  • Layout: Many tables were removed; DIVs were added, etc. To avoid any confusion Gallery 1.6 introduces a new naming scheme for CSS. Every G1 CSS class (except for some basics) is now named: g-«...».
  • File system structure: The html_wrap folder, which contained header, footer etc. was completely removed. Also: the frames has been moved, the html folder was removed, and many files were split.
  • Templates: The HTML for displaying the main page, album thumbnails and the photo view were separated out from the code, into new template files.
If you are upgrading be sure to make a backup of your Gallery code. There were no modifications to the code that touches your albums and images, but we always recommend that you back up your data before trying out a new version of Gallery.

New Features

  • Captcha support (new in alpha3!) - Gallery administrators now have a good option to help prevent automated comment spam.
  • Group support (new in alpha3!) - Initial group support lets you add users to groups and assign album based permissions on a group instead of on individual users.
    Also added group support for Joomla (new in RC1)
  • Accesskeys - Easy shortcuts to navigate your Gallery with your keyboard. Usage varies from browser to browser, but in Firefox it is <ALT>+<Key>. You can identify the access keys the same way that you would in a desktop application: One letter of actions is underlined and if you move your mouse over buttons you will see a message if a shortcut is available. Features can now be reached with these shortcuts including all site navigation
  • Recreate captions - If you made a mistake, or just want to change the format, you can now easily recreate all captions for an album (including sub-albums if desired).
  • Usage report (new in RC1) - You can see now which user or album is consuming how much space.
  • Recursive comment notification (new in RC1) - Top5 voted feature. "Email me when comments are added" recursively.
  • Rebuild capture dates. (New in RC1) - If you made a mistake, or added jhead/exiftags later, you can now easily rebuild all capture dates for an album (including sub-albums if desired).
  • Resize Original (New in RC1) - Now you can resize your original photo also!
  • Enhanced Integration into Joomla
  • Nice Lightbox2 effect (New in RC1)
  • Usability improvements
    • Gallery 1.6 has an installer that has an "easy" mode for fresh installations so you don't have to dig through all of the settings to get up and running. If you pick easy mode you'll only need to provide the minimum information required to configure your Gallery
    • Popups and other messages are now consistent.
    • The main page is much more customizable than in previous versions.
    • Cropper is now in Javascript instead of Java.
    • Navigation via arrow keys. (New in RC1)

Feedback

If you Please visit the Gallery 1.6 Alpha Feedback forum topic and let us know!
Found a bug ? We made a special bug topic for this. Visit the Gallery 1.6 RC1 bug thread