Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 is ready!

Three weeks ago we released Gallery 3.0 Alpha 1 and we're happy to say that the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of you have given great feedback about the features that you'd like to see in the product and we've been hard at work trying to get the product ready for release. For those of you who used Alpha 1, you can see that there are still plenty of things that we need to improve. To reward you for your patience and give you a taste of what's to come, we're releasing Alpha 2 which has significant improvements!

Intended audience

The Alpha 2 release is still intended for 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 there is still no upgrade path from Gallery 2 to Gallery 3, nor is there an upgrade path from Alpha 1 to Alpha 2. Yes, that's all coming but no, it hasn't been a high enough priority yet.

Security warning

This is a technology preview of Gallery 3.0 and as such it is not intended to be installed on public websites yet. The application is currently undergoing a professional security audit yet but it may have serious security vulnerabilities. Please resist the temptation to share your test drive with the world and wait for the final release first!

OK OK let me try it already!

With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 (1.3 MB) .

The Gallery 3 Philosophy

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 and putting Emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy. To see an example of this, check out the admn dashboard and the user/group administration page.

• 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. Leaving out some levels of abstraction really helps to lose some weight!

• On the 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. Adios, PHP 4!

  • Remember the days before jQuery? We don't want to look back either :-) It has never easier to add interactivity, AJAX or other custom behaviors to your user interface than it is with jQuery. We use jQuery and jQuery UI widely and UI 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 restraint in keeping things simple and it shows in the small size of existing modules. For instance, it takes a small fraction of the code to create a slideshow or comments module for Gallery 3 than it took to implement the same feature set in Gallery 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:

• A simpler and powerful Flash based upload UI (we're still tinkering with this!) (new in alpha 2)
• Reset / forgot password mechanism (new in alpha 2)
• Localized UI with built-in editor (server side support is not finished) (new in alpha 2)
• RSS feed for comments (new in alpha 2)
• RSS feed for new images or movies (new in alpha 2)
• EXIF read support (new in alpha 2)
• Import photos from the local webserver (new in alpha 2)
• Support for uploading and viewing FLV movie files (new in alpha 2)
• Ability to view full size photos (new in alpha 2)
• Boolean and full text search (new in alpha 2)
• 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 & drop interface)
• Basic user permission management
• Admin dashboard with drag and drop blocks

Missing Key Features

These features are yet to be added and will be part of the final 3.0 release:

• Bulk editing of albums and photos
• A migration path from Gallery 2
• An image block for your Gallery or external pages
• Improved permissions UI.
• Basic embedding hooks / instructions
• (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)

Roadmap

Gallery 3.0 is undergoing a professional security audit from our good friends over at Gotham Digital Science. They're going to dissect the code and probe it for security vulnerabilities, then report back to us. We'll fix it all up to be safe and sound before shipping out the final release to you. Your security is important to us!

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 .

Got feedback?

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.