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Sneak Peek on Gallery 3.0 - First Technology Preview
Submitted by valiant on Mon, 2009-02-02 18:26
After just three months of development, the first public release of Gallery 3.0 is here! Gallery 3.0 Alpha 1 is a technology preview release with most features in place and ready to take a test drive with you.
It was back in October at the Gallery Sprint when the Gallery crew set out to create a new Gallery application with simplicity in mind. Three months have passed, the new Gallery version is up and running and indeed much easier to use, customize and extend.
Thanks for your continued support! Read on for more details...
Intended Audience
The intended audience of this release are enthusiasts, designers and module developers. This is the right time to do a test drive with the improved user interface and to start developing feature extensions and designing new themes.
Note:- A series of key features are yet to be added (e.g. a way to reset a forgotten password).
- There is no guaranteed upgrade path yet. You might be forced to reinstall Gallery 3 to use the next public release.
Security Warning
This is the first technology preview of Gallery 3.0 and as such it is not intended to be installed on public websites yet. The application has not undergone a professional security audit yet and may have serious security vulnerabilities. Please contain your excitement and wait for the final release before you share your test drive with the world! :-)
Try It Yourself
With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 (844 kB).
Simplicity Is King
Let's have a closer look at Gallery 3.0 to see why it's so much easier and more fun to customize and extend Gallery 3.0 and how our user centric development process ensures that the user interface is not an afterthought.
- Scope and Target Audience - Before starting development on Gallery 3.0, the target audience and the scope of the application have been clearly defined. Gallery 3 is not a general purpose web application handling any file format you throw at it. And it's not supported on every web platform that exists.
Prudent decisions helped to simplify the product at a very early stage. For instance, there are no longer item-level permissions. Permissions are managed on an album level. This simplified many aspects, from the database, over scalability, up to the user interface. - Simple to Use - We're glad to have usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense, avoiding the dreaded text deserts you might remember from past incarnations of Gallery. Emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks really quick and simple, and having everything well organized. The new admin dashboard is a good example of this principle.
- Size Matters - Gallery 3.0 is currently a mere 3.5MB (uncompressed on your disk), with all its features. Compare that to the 16.5MB of Gallery 2.3's bare bones minimal package. It wouldn't be fair to compare it to the full Gallery 2.3 package (37MB without, 89MB with translations). Leaving out some levels of abstraction really helps to lose some weight!
- On Shoulders of Giants... - Gallery 3.0 wouldn't be possible without the great advances of recent years.
- Gallery 3.0 is built on top of Kohana, a PHP 5 framework that makes PHP application development a breeze. Kudos to the folks from Kohana for their support and for providing this first class application framework!
- Kohana's prowess in elegance and simplicity couldn't be achieved without the vast improvements of PHP 5 over PHP 4. We're glad we can finally seize the full power of PHP 5 and say PHP 4 finally goodbye.
- Remember the days before jQuery? We wouldn't want to look back either. It was never easier to add interactivity, AJAX or some custom behavior to your user interface than with jQuery. We use jQuery and jQuery UI where we can and JavaScript development couldn't be more hassle-free.
- Simple to Customize - Gone are the days of learning 4 different languages (HTML, JavaScript, Smarty, PHP), many different APIs (theme and core API, Gallery 2 smarty tags) and 10 step tutorials to create your own theme. With Gallery 3, you can create your own theme just by copying an existing theme to a new folder. No further changes necessary to make it work. How's that for easy? There's no templating language to learn other than HTML and PHP.
- Simple to Extend - We've exercised great discipline in keeping things simple and resisting the urge to engineer general solutions to problems that only a small minority would care about. And it shows in how quick one can come up to speed with Gallery 3.0 and the small size of existing modules. For instance, it takes a small fraction of the code to create a slide show or comments module for Gallery 3 than it takes to implement the same feature set in Gallery 2.
- Scope #2, Supported Configurations - Gallery 3 is supported on Linux / Unix servers, running a MySQL 5 and an Apache 2.2 web server with PHP 5.2. Emphasis on supported, not necessarily required. It may well work with MySQL 4.1 on MS Windows as well. But the Gallery team is going to focus its energy on making the best possible product on the supported configurations.
Currently Implemented Features
The following features are implemented and functioning at varying levels.
- Basic upload (to be replaced with a wonderful Flash upload widget)
- Album browsing
- Item commenting, comment moderation
- Spam protection with Akismet and Recaptcha
- Image toolkit support for ImageMagick, GD, and GraphicsMagick
- Theme system, including separate admin theme.
- Module system to extend the functionality, and a series of existing modules
- Basic metadata boolean search with relevance ranking
- Flash-powered slideshow (Cooliris)
- Album media RSS feeds
- Quick edits of item metadata
- In place item deletion and rotation
- User group management (drag'n'drop interface)
- Basic user permission management
- Admin dashboard
Missing Key Features
These features are yet to be added and will be part of the final 3.0 release:- Convenient upload UI (we're aiming for a simple yet powerful Flash based uploader).
- Reset / forgot password mechanism.
- Localized UI with built-in editor (most of the plumbing is in place).
- Bulk editing of albums and photos
- A migration path from Gallery 2
- An image block for your Gallery or external pages
- Improved permissions UI.
- Movie support.
- EXIF read support.
- RSS feed for comments.
- Basic embedding hooks / instructions
- (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)
Roadmap
Gallery 3.0 will go under a professional security audit in the next few weeks and there will be at least one beta release about a month from now before the Gallery 3.0 will be released tentatively 6 weeks from now.
You can track development on our trac roadmap and if you can't wait for the next public release, you can track the code via our Subversion repository.
Feedback
If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Alpha Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.
Will G3 ship with more than the default theme? I would want to be able to replicate my G2 install as closely as possible, which would mean the carbon theme.
@joemonster: G3 may ship with multiple themes, but they won't be like G2's themes, at least not right away. Right now we're focused on creating one really good theme and not worrying quite as much about creating many. We're hoping for some community support in creating a proliferation of themes.
Installed and running on virtual server:
PHP version = 5.2.8-0.dotdeb.1 apache2handler
Webserver = Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 5.2.8-0.dotdeb.1
Database = mysqli 5.0.32-Debian_7etch8-log
____
I wish that there was a temporary cross-over to the existing G2.3 install so as to utilize those missing modules.
Obviously, the G3-RC migration will provide for reconciling the contents of existing database items.
This new direction is exciting and offers great promise !!!
@islandmonusvi
The architecture between G2.3 and G3 is so completely different that there is no way G2.x modules will be able to be used in G3 without being totally rewritten
Tim
http://www.timalmdal.com
After I installed the PHP 5.2.6 provided in CentOS 5.2 testing package, the Gallery 3.0 can run. However, I click "Dashboard" or some other options, it return me a error page which said "unauthorized". Does anyone run Gallery 3.0 in CentOS 5.2 without problems?
My Gallery 2.3 is running on CentOS, so I want to test Gallery 3.0 on CentOS, too. I will download Ubuntu Server to run in Virtual Machine to test it.
I am running Gallery on a CentOS 5.2 vmware guest. Though, I have PHP 5.2.8 instead. I can run Gallery 3.0 but not without problem (has reported here and in the feedback page).... navigation around is OK, but unable to load any photo for the time being.
As a Alpha-1 version, sorry to say that I did not spend too much time trying to find out why I cannot load any photo.
When we migrate from 2-3, will migration mean all of our files on G2 will or can be transferred to G3, but not the themes, css, etc? right? I mean how will this work? Will there be a server side program like Fantastico?
Great job and thanks. I can't wait!
Hey one more thing. Was anything done to update the use of custom frames?
I'm guessing PostgreSQL support is getting dropped? Or are you at least making it relatively easy to write a driver for it? As one of the (apparently) few people that use PostgreSQL, I'd really like to see it as a supported configuration.
There are no plans for the Gallery team to support any database other than MySQL in G3.
However, having said that, the Kohana framework does support PostgreSQL (i.e. they have a driver as part of their framework) and so it should work. However, if G3 starts using specific MySQL features, which again, we have no plans to do, you may find yourself having to tweak the code in order for it to work.
Tim
http://www.timalmdal.com
Great to see Gallery being developed like this.
I look forward to help w conversion from G2.3; and to then seeing if a Drupal integration proves viable (read a little re this on drupal groups).
What of URLs: will it be possible to have same SEF URLs with G3 as I currently have with 2.3 (ie, some options so they can be same: most importantly, I think, for the albums)?
Hopefully, will be easier to edit captions/keywords for batches of photos: currently, I find that can save and edit next 9, and repeat, rather than - say - moving quickly to edit photos 37-45 of an album. [Might have been mentioned already, but I hadn't noticed]
Looks *great* after 5 minutes! Big round of thanks and applause.
Love it that the resizes URLs are more straightforward, and that the resizes preserve image metadata. Both are huge pluses.
Visual effects, menus, etc. are achingly slow on my laptop (4-year-old Pentium M running FF 3 on Ubuntu 8.10). Is this piclens? Jquery?
Got to play with it more, and I'll be back.
als56k
Looks like the overall majority of the people think you did a great job guys! Keep up the great work...now lets get 'r done!!
For all you IE folks out there, just committed CSS fixes to correct the overall layout display in the admin area. G3 is looking and working much better in IE now. You would need to install from Subversion to see these fixes.
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2tbsp.com
there two subversions - are they absolutely the same?
http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gallery/gallery3/trunk/
http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/browser/gallery3/trunk/
Yes. Those are both viewing the same Subversion repository. Here's the SVN command to checkout.
svn checkout https://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/trunk
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2tbsp.com
Please add image pre-fetching to individual picture views. Its so simple, it would make gallery appear SO much quicker, and it just makes sense...
Please add to G3.
- a better Upload interface (criteria when uploading, choice of number of uploads, etc..).
- a better Windows/ Internet Explorer integration.
.. and the product will be perfect... anyway G3 is good news.
thanks a lot.
I hope that the finale version of Gallery 3 will run ok with Windows as server OS. XAMPP 1.7.0 together with Vista gives the following: Fatal error: Cannot access empty property in D:\web\galleri3\kohana\libraries\drivers\Database\Mysqli.php on line 122
I have run Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 for several yeas now at the Windows platform. I hope that I also will be able to continue to use Gallery 3 in the future without changing OS or gallery solution.
It might, no guarantees.
Hope this adds some clarification:
...."And it's not supported on every web platform that exists."
Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team
Gallery 3 seems to break on 1&1 hosting.
Gallery3 - "Third time's the charm".
@tsaavik: can you explain what you mean by image prefetching in this case? What should we load, and when should we load it?
@amrock82: we have a better upload interface coming in alpha 2 (it's already in svn if you want to try that out). What are you looking for in Explorer integration? More details please.
@brr: to echo what floridave said, the gallery dev team is not going to invest time into supporting Windows. But this is open source, so if it's of enough interest to the community I'm sure you'll see some support emerging.
@Fotographer: sorry, that's not enough information for us to help you. Please provide more details, thanks!
On 1&1 hosting everything except the main page break.
the control panel, album pages, slideshows, etc.
in addition G3 doesn't work without removing the contents of the .htaccess file.
Gallery3 - "Third time's the charm".
@Fotographer: please start a thread in the G3 forums:
http://gallery.menalto.com/forum/98
This is a story and is hard to follow with various issues, one at a time is easier to follow.
Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team
I waiting new G3 for my website http://www.oldgrodno.com/ and hope it will help to decide problem of speed.
I hope speed of load G3 will be much more improoved in comparison with G2.x
Because even on 9k images and 500 albums with minimal modules, on classic theme, it is still very slow... it is annoying
Hope you will realize image load function direcly to webserver(as static content), not via PHP. Thus this images could be cashed by apache/squid/lighthttpd/nginx...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Grodno, Belarus
Old Grodno photos http://www.oldgrodno.com/ Старые фотографии Гродно. Открытки Гродно.
I have some questions and feature requests for Gallery3, I am very much looking forward to the new release (I am currently running G2 but have not really come to the point where I use it extensively for a number of reasons).
So on to the question:
* Is there a plan to make a Gallery Remote module for G3 so that it is possible to upload directly from iPhoto
And the feature requests that mostly relates to the default theme. The PicLensLite way of looking at pictures is very nice but as an "old school" web user I would like the default view for individual images to have more features like:
* The buttons for previous/next are hard to pinpoint with the mouse (they are not centered and are very small)
* It would be very nice to have Keyboard navigation using right/left arrow on the keyboard (like Picasaweb and Facebook) - (I know the keyboard works with PicLensLite-view)
* Mouse over buttons for next/prev that appear when hovering the mouse over an image so that it is possible to click the left half for prev and right half for next image
Most of the above requests come down to a wish to have an easy way to switch between images that don't require a use of the mouse and moving the pointer between each view (because of an ever changing position of the next/prev button)
One more "feature" for the default theme that would be nice is to be able to reduce the vertical pixels space that the theme uses. This is for all the users that have Widescreen displays (often with 768/800 pixels hight) where the Gallery Icon and heading use up a lot of the available screen.
If the single image view would have Keyboard navigation the above would not be a problem, then you could scroll down slightly so that you only see the picture and then use the keyboard to switch between images. (This works great for Picasaweb)
I've browsed through the tickets for development in the Alpha, Beta and final release and not found anything on this point. I think it would be very valuable to have g3 ship with a kick-ass default theme that would cater to the requirements of a lot of the users out there.
(It is this that has stopped me from using G2, the default theme is to limited and the other available themes all have their problems and quirks that make the product not really "fly" the way it deserves")
I would also very much like pre-fetching. Not sure if it's exactly what tsaavik is asking for, but I would like G3 to pre-load the next photo when one is viewing the individual/resized photo. Picasaweb has been doing this for some time and it feels lightning fast - clicking "Next" instantly brings up the next photo. It feels almost like a desktop app.
Ideally, pre-fetching would occur not only for photos, but for videos as well. And as long as we're making requests, it would be great if there was an adjustable variable to control how many items should be pre-fetched. Those concerned about bandwidth can set it to 0 (no pre-fetch) while those unconcerned about bandwidth can set it to 3 or more.
There have been several requests for pre-fetching as detailed in this thread:
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/63190
I tried to implement this in G2, but unfortunately ran into the admittedly low limits of my programming prowess.
BTW, great job so far!
@aminoff I can't comment on Gallery Remote, but your suggestions for item navigation have been considered but haven't formally been made into tasks yet. I'll make a ticket.
Your vertical spacing request will not likely make it's way into the initial release of G3. This sounds like it might be better developed as a module rather than being built directly into the default theme. Let me know if you're interested in taking something like this on.
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2tbsp.com
I second the vote for "Add From Local Server". It's how I add files on my current Gallery 2 installation.
@thumb Thanks for the reply and the added ticket for some of my requests.
(I am watching the ticket, 10h to before next release of G3 ;-) )
I really think that the default theme (or available from the "standard" modules) should have some "bells and whistles" like the features that is not mentioned in the ticket:
* Enable prev/next navigation by clicking in the left/right half of the image
* Enable prev/next keyboard navigation in image view
Anyone else who can answer if there is a plan (or general input) on making a Gallery Remote module for G3?
I have a Intel Mac running leopard. I use entropy's PHP installation (PHP: 5.2.5 Release 1) to be precise and even though I enable short_open_tag in my php.ini and also add the Location tag information as described in the FAQ to my apache configuration file, I still get that error "Gallery requires short_open_tag to be on.".
Could this .. http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=39969 have anything to do with it, and is there a way to resolve this?
Sharath M
http://sharathm.livejournal.com
@codemod try creating a page with
<?php phpinfo(); ?>in it and look for the short_open_tags line. What does it say under the master and local columns for that? If phpinfo says that it's not enabled, then this is a PHP configuration issue (not sure what exactly the problem is, but there are probably plenty of experts who can help out with that). If it *does* say that short_open_tags is enabled, then this is a bug in G3 that I can fix.[i]Hello there..
Is it possible to upload images by guest or registered visitors?
Thank you very much.
@Ahmed Sprouse: Yes. Select "Edit Permissions" on any album and specify that guests (or registered users) have Edit permission. That'll let them upload photos.
Congrats and an absolutely painless install. Great work.
I echo the thoughts of others in referring to a wish to have the Lens included. I'm a Mac user with Aperture and it's appalling when exporting versions you can't see the lens using Exif-O-Matic and others, however that's a Mac Aperture issue.
I've 3 main issues/questions thus far.
1) Lens data/xmp data upload ability
2) Installation crashes
3) Performance overhead
1)
That said, when uploading to Gallery2 or Gallery3 the lens info is missing HOWEVER you can see the info using Lightroom and you can also see the lens details if exporting using a XMP Sidecar. It would be awesome to have Gallery2/3 allow you to import additional text files and map those to tags/exif/IPTC. I'd like to think it makes sense to have the same file name, excl extension, for the XMP files as the image file.
As an example the following data from the XMP sidecar file that I'd like to be able to map.
<?xpacket begin="" id="...."?>
<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/" x:xmptk="XMP Core 4.1.1 RC">
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<rdf:Description rdf:about=""
...
photoshop:City="Gondar"
photoshop:Country="Ethiopia"
photoshop:Credit="Lorentran Publications"
photoshop:Source="Lorentran's 1/2 baked photo shoot"
photoshop:ICCProfile="Adobe RGB (1998)"
xap:Rating="4"
exif:ExposureBiasValue="0"
exif:ExposureMode="0"
exif:MeteringMode="5"
exif:ISOSpeedRatings="100"
exif:DateTimeOriginal="2009-01-16T17:36:13+0000"
exif:SceneCaptureType="0"
exif:FocalLength="280"
exif:PixelYDimension="3164"
exif:ExposureProgram="2"
exif:ColorSpace="1"
exif:LensMaxMM="280"
exif:PixelXDimension="4752"
exif:ApertureValue="5.6"
exif:FlashpixVersion="1.0"
exif:WhiteBalance="1"
exif:LensMinMM="98"
exif:ShutterSpeedValue="0.02"
exif:Flash="16"
exif:ExifVersion="2.2.1"
exif:LensModel="EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM +1.4x"
tiff:Model="Canon EOS 50D"
tiff:PhotometricInterpretation="2"
tiff:BitsPerSample="16"
tiff:ImageLength="3164"
tiff:Make="Canon"
tiff:ImageWidth="4752"
aux:SerialNumber= ............
aux:Lens="EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM +1.4x"
Iptc4xmpCore:CiAdrCtry="Ethiopia"
Iptc4xmpCore:CiAdrCity="Gondar">
<dc:rights>
<rdf:Alt>
<rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Lorentran Misadventures</rdf:li>
</rdf:Alt>
</dc:rights>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>
2)
Another issue is around the stability of the installation and I've done this 3 times to see if the results are the same. Each time I can get it to crash.
Install Gallery3
Goto Modules
Select Exif Module
error returned below
Return to Admin screen and login again
Select Exif module and all OK however you can't make any amendments to the Exif module
"Exception
core/controllers/admin.php [25]:
@todo UNAUTHORIZED
Stack Trace
*
Admin_Controller->__construct( )
* kohana/core/Kohana.php [235]:
ReflectionClass->newInstance( )
* kohana/core/Event.php [209]:
Kohana::instance( )
* kohana/core/Bootstrap.php [55]:
Event::run( Array
(
[0] => Kohana
[1] => instance
)
)
* index.php [61]:
require( kohana/core/Bootstrap.php )"
3)
Running Gallery3 takes a lot more resources on the Mac (ability the Mac Mini) and is a lot slower to render the admin pages. The upside is the image details screens and other details for the users of the gallery appears OK.
Thanks for any feedback.
Lorry
I can't reproduce this issue. Please start a thread in the forums as it is hard to track in a story.
Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team
@lorrysvault I've filed http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/131 for the EXIF issue. What are you comparing Gallery3 to when you say "Gallery3 takes a lot more resources on the Mac (ability the Mac Mini) and is a lot slower to render the admin pages"?
Hi everybody
I got some time today and tried to set up Gallery3. It's been running within 2 hours - because as usual I did not read everthing ;-) -. I use Gallery2 for some years know Swissphoto.netBilderforum.ch in connection with Joomla without big problems. So I was wondering what you guys are up to now! I have to say, verrrry impressing! I da.... good piece of work. I seems to run much faster (iMac 24, Firefox) but does have some bugs with (Safari3 - o.k. that browser is not at its best these days). But in general it is a big improvement and I love it!
One question: I like the video stuff but I do not like this "View This in 3D" on the tip right. Is that a licence problem or is it possible to remove it. For me this is one of the many useless things companies try to put on us (like facebook and co. - I now I will not have many friend if I say this but that is o.k.)
Here the link to my test site:
http://www.k-text.ch/gallery3/index.php/Greece
I will go into it later on this months and will try to give some feedback.
http://www.swissphoto.net
firebug..., firebug..., firebug...
I got already the first issue:
If I switch to a Tag album the layout (template) does move to the right side if I use Firefox? Any idea what this could be?
Browser: Firefox 3.0.7 (quite extreme) and Shiira 2.2 (only a little)
http://www.k-text.ch/gallery3/index.php/tags/2
It does not appear using Safari 3.0.1
http://www.swissphoto.net
firebug..., firebug..., firebug...
It appears that the size of the graphic in the upper right hand corner effects the layout and pushes you of the page. I don't have the problem using the standard gallery icon. you can create a ticket here if you have a sourceforge id: https://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/newticket
http://www.timalmdal.com
O.k. I got meanwhile to the same result. But how can one change the css or better where to change the size of the logo. I think that should be possible, because anybody has got another logo. But I do understand this topic is probably not so urgent at this stage of the development.
Sorry, but I do not get the point with the sourceforge ticket
greetings, gadulia
http://www.swissphoto.net
firebug..., firebug..., firebug...
@gadulia: re sourceforge ticket. That is the the link to where tickets are created. When issues like you are experiencing arise, we need to get them into the tracking system to that they can be eventually addressed. Telling us in this forum that you have some issues, is nice, but in order for them to be tracked and eventually rectified, we need to get them in the tracking system.
http://www.timalmdal.com
@gadulia regarding the "View in 3D", that's because we're using the CoolIris code to do our slideshow. It's a very nice slideshow that they do for free, but the cost is that it comes with this small bit of information in the top right telling you about how you can download their 3D Wall version (which by the way, is really excellent). It would be very easy to replace this with a better slideshow, if you've got one that you prefer. You could easily create your own module to do that...
As with what Threatcon said, for those on windows you will need an IIS ISAPI plugin.
http://www.micronovae.com/ModRewrite/ModRewrite.html
Also another very good MOD_REWRITE for windows plugin, have been running this for years with no noticable problems and is fully compatibile in our experince. (EXCEPT FOR APACHE ONLY FEATURES)
Cheers
Cisco
Thanks for reporting. This problem's been fixed! http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gallery?view=rev&revision=20446
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2tbsp.com
Guys, I haven't looked at the alpha version, but I've just installed version 2 on one of my domains. Fantastic work! I read in the "Missing Key Features" that you want a flash uploader, don't know if you have it already, but if there's any Flash work I can help you guys with, I'd be glad to. Please contact me if I can give you a hand with any Flash script, be it uploader, video player or who knows, maybe an Air application to go along with the Gallery. Cheers!
@evilpenguin:
In the Alpha 3 version of Gallery 3, we settled with the Flow player for flv / mp4 videos, and with swfupload for uploads.
We're currently customizing the swfupload based upload logic. But it looks like we'll get by with customizing JavaScript code only.
If you ideas on how to improve the user experience / the video player, please come by at #gallery on irc (freenode).
You write, that you'll add a upload tool, which will require Flash. Will it be possible to switch back to a simple pure HTML based form? In my opinion a fallback to a plain HTML form would be also nice, in case the visitor doesn't have Flash installed.
I don't like Flash and I don't have it installed on one of my machines. I don't want to force my Gallery users to install Flash, just to upload their pictures.
"We'll switch from what we have to http://swfupload.org/, which provides the same benefits, and it degrades nicely if Flash is not available. "
See: http://gallery.menalto.com/gallery_3.0_alpha_2_released#comment-301581 for more info on flash and why.
Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team
Uups, I missed that. Directly on their homepage, they have:
"Degrades gracefully to normal HTML upload form if Flash or javascript is unavailable"
I tried all demos on http://demo.swfupload.org/ and I didn't see this HTML upload form, so I think they don't have this feature "enabled" in their demos?
I think it's important to have a fallback for people without flash, and this fallback should be not just a compromise. It should be a alternative, which works like it did in Gallery 2.x. It should also be possible for the admin to force this simple HTML-Only form, for the case, he doesn't like Flash on his page. A flash based upload may be a nice feature, but it should be optional with some way to disable it.