In January of this year we set up a separate forum category for 3rd party modules and themes, in July we added a Gallery 2 Demo Sites showcase, and the list on the user contributions page on the Codex (our official documentation site) has been steadly growing since it went live over a year ago. Gallery just wouldn't be what it is without the hard work of users just like you. Thanks! Related to your hard work, we have some fun things up our sleeves for you to look forward to in the next couple of months: your modules and themes downloadable from inside of Gallery 2.2, a theme competition, and maybe a surprise or two :).

The most recent contribution we would like to highlight is Joe7's Gallery Theme Demo. It's a very neat site that let's you apply various Gallery 2 Themes, Image Frames, and Color Packs to one Gallery install to see how they might look on your site before downloading them. Thanks Joe7!

This summer, the Gallery project participated in the second Google Summer of Code. The Summer of Code is a program, funded by Google, to essentially give students a paid internship with Open Source projects. At the beginning of September, the second Summer of Code completed successfuly, not only for Gallery, but each of the 101 other mentoring organizations. For eight days, students from across the globe submitted proposals from our suggested projects and ideas of their own. Gallery received 71 applications after Google filtered out the ones that wouldn't be acceptable anyway. Our Summer of Code mentors and administrators carefully reviewed the applications during the two week triage process. We considered many factors, including the timeframe, necessity, usability, and feasibility, which eventually led us to our top selections.

The Gallery Team is excited to announce the transfer of the project lead position from project founder Bharat Mediratta to Chris Kelly. Chris, known online as ckdake, has been with the project in a project management position since early 2004, primarily focused on managing bugs, features, and releases of Gallery 1 (along with some development every now and then). Now that Gallery 2 is out the door and work on Gallery 1 is slowing, Bharat wanted to get back to writing code for Gallery 2 instead of spending all his time managing the project. Over the next month most of the project management responsibilities (including team communication, responding to email to Gallery, and generally being the public representative of Gallery) will transfer over to Chris with his new title as Gallery Project Manager.

We are proud to announce the availability of version 1.0 of the The Gallery Virtual Appliance. It contains Gallery version 1.5.4 and 2.1.2 (the current latest).

The Gallery VMware Appliance is a GNU/Linux distribution based on rPath Linux. Basically, it is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) appliance with both Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 pre-installed and pre-configured, along with all of the required utilities and most of the optional ones. They are both pre-loaded with some random pictures from various Gallery team members so that you can test things out without even having to find your own images.

This enables users to test and play around with a complete Gallery environment without having to install all the prerequisites on their local computer or hosting space. To run the Appliance, you'll need one of VMware 5.5+ Workstation, VMware Player 1.0+, or VMware Server 1.0.

Download the appliance, unzip it and boot it up using VMware Player. It couldn't be easier! For more details, check the documentation.

Gallery 2.1.2 is now available for download. This release adds no new features. It fixes a minor information leakage in Gallery 2.1 and 2.1.1a and a major session ID disclosure in all versions prior to Gallery 2.1. Note that these flaws only affect installations where Gallery's storage folder is accessible directly from the web, which we strongly discourage during the installation process.

Gallery 1.5.4 is now available for download. This release is a pure bug fix release. No security bugs and no new features. Besides minor bugfixes the most annoying bug, the broken permission dialog, was fixed. We recommend all Gallery 1 users upgrade to 1.5.4 to avoid problems. You can download Gallery 1.5.4 from the Gallery Download Page.