Gallery 1.6 Alpha 2 Released

Submitted by ckdake on Tue, 2006-10-31 03:44

The Gallery team is proud to announce the second alpha release of Gallery 1.6! This version is only for testing purposes and is not meant for production sites. It comes with some great new features, but contains incompatible changes with older versions of Gallery 1, may contain bugs and has not yet passed our security audit. We make no guarantees of security or stability! This release introduces large changes to CSS and layout, so don't forget to make a backup before upgrading! 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 Alpha 2 from the download page on SourceForge.

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

  • 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).
  • 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.

For a more detailed list of changes see: http://jems.de/archive/1.6/summary_1.6_changes.html

Feedback

Love it? Hate it? Have a suggestion? 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 Alpha bug thread

The Future of Gallery 1.x

Given all of these changes (and thinking about Gallery 2), you might be curious what the future plans of G1 are.Have a look at this Gallery 1.x Development Schedule for some explanation.

Making a backup

We have provided a small PHP script with this version to assist you in making a backup. When you download and decompress this release, the script will be located in:

gallery/setup/backup_albums.php

To run this script, put your Gallery into configuration mode and copy backup_albums.php out of its location in the setup directory and into your existing main Gallery directory. Run this script from your browser. It will package the important album data and save a backup to your computer, in one of two formats: .tar.gz (useful on Unix/Linux systems) or .zip (useful on Windows systems).

The script gives you the option of backing up your entire albums ("All files") directory or just the Gallery database files ("Data files only"). While you should have a backup copy of all your photos, for most upgrades, it is sufficient to just back up the data files only. Note that backing up all the files could produce a huge file, since all of your photos will be included.

Finally, verify the contents of the downloaded backup file to make sure the files were indeed saved. Once you have the data files backed up, you can confidently proceed with reconfiguring your Gallery and updating your albums. Make sure you remove the copy of backup_albums.php from the Gallery directory, so visitors can't make a copy of your entire Gallery!