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.

• 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

• 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.