I'm pleased to announce that we've restructured the Gallery Core team and have officially taken on several new members who have already been extremely productive on the project. I say "officially" because unofficially these motivated and dedicated folks have already been the ones driving the bus for some time now. If you've spent any time with the project you probably already know of most of these folks so gather round and give them the round of applause they so richly deserve.

I've upgraded the forum software on this website to a newer version. We were using a very old version of phpBB and I upgraded to phpBB2 which is far superior. No forum data wass lost, and everything should work pretty much as before, except with lots of new features. The whole process took less than an hour.

Update: Forum notification is working again!

We've come a long way with Gallery 2.0. While it doesn't quite yet have all of the cool features from G1, it's in a new framework that is far more reliable, scalable and customizable than G1 ever was. It currently runs on MySQL and PostgreSQL equally, makes liberal use of templates, is internationalized and already partially localized into 5 different languages.

What G2 is missing is a nice looking UI. We need a good UI designer to help us to clean up the navigation and make it all look good. Do you have the necessary skills to help us put polish on G2 and make it presentable to the world? If so, we've got room for you on the team. Remember that working on a project like this looks great on your resume :-) Read more for the job requirements.

Update: We got a ton of applicants and have chosen a new UI designer. There's still work for everybody, though so stay tuned in the UI forums if you want to get involved!

The Gallery development team has grown by one! Aliana Shanti Mediratta was born on Thursday 4/17 at 3:30 in the afternoon. I am pleased to report that mother and daughter are happy and healthy. At birth Aliana tipped the scales at 7lbs 10oz and was 20 inches long. I intend to have her writing new Gallery features by 2006.

I apologize for the multiple downtimes the website has had in the last two weeks. There were a variety of issues that have (hopefully) all been resolved at this point. I doubly apologize for not warning y'all about this most recent downtime since I actually knew about it in advance. Read more for the details.

JoEllen Drazan has created an excellent visual tutorial for customizing Gallery. On her site she provides easy, visual instructions to show you how to go from a stock Gallery install to a thing of beauty like her Lord of the Rings Fan Site. If you're considering modifying your Gallery, you should check out what she's got!

PixelPoet has also created an excellent tutorial for customizing Gallery that demonstrates (among other things) how to put a right or left menu on any Gallery page. You should check out her work also!

And while we're at it, let's not overlook the tremendous job that Kommercial has done in creating and maintaining the Customizing and Hacks section of the Gallery User Guide! He has been working tirelessly to pull great hacks and mods out of the forums and make them readily available in the User Guide for everybody. Thanks, Kommercial!