Four weeks ago we released Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 and we're happy to
say that the response continues to
be
overwhelmingly positive. The community support and feedback
about features that you'd like to see in the product has been
outstanding, and you've helped us track down many issues large and
small in the code. To encourage your continued support and
patience we're releasing Alpha 3 which has significant
improvements!
Intended audience
The Alpha 3 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 earlier Gallery 3 Alphas to
Alpha 3. Yes, an upgrade is 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
has undergone a professional security audit, which has identified
some security vulnerabilities and will be fixed before the final
release. Please resist the temptation to share your test drive
with the world and wait for the final release first!
Let's get the download
With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is:
Download Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 (1.1 MB)
or retrieve directly from the SourceForge
repository:
svn co
http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/trunk
The Gallery 3 Philosophy
Let's have a closer look at Gallery 3.0 to see why it's so easy and
fun to customize. 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
simplification extends from the database 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. The emphasis is on making simple,
frequent tasks quick and easy. To see an example of this, check
out the admin dashboard and the user/group administration page.
-
Size matters - Gallery 3.0 is currently a mere
4.1MB (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
We resolved 58 separate issues in this alpha 3 release including:
-
Support for database table prefixes (alpha 3)
-
Random image block for the sidebar (alpha 3)
-
Module administration view (alpha 3)
-
Added translation server and localization client (alpha 3)
-
Reimplemented the Flash uploader using SWFUpload (alpha 3)
-
Album sort orderers (alpha 3)
-
Add photos directly from the web server (alpha 3)
-
User/group/permissions management UI (alpha 3)
-
Auto-login at the end of the installer, with a welcome page (alpha 3)
-
Moved Google Maps and Polar Rose modules out of the official package into the community repository (alpha 3)
-
Localized UI with built-in editor (server side support is not finished) (alpha 2)
-
RSS feed for comments (alpha 2)
-
RSS feed for new images or movies (alpha 2)
-
EXIF read support (alpha 2)
-
Import photos from the local webserver (alpha 2)
-
Support for uploading and viewing FLV movie files (alpha 2)
-
Ability to view full size photos (alpha 2)
-
Boolean and full text search (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
- Improved permissions UI.
- Basic embedding hooks / instructions
- (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)
Roadmap
Gallery 3.0 has received a professional security audit from our good
friends over at Gotham Digital
Science. They've dissected the code and probed it for security
vulnerabilities, and then reported back to us. We have not yet
addressed all of their concerns in this release, but we will
resolve all security issues they discovered before the final
release. Your security is important to us!
You can track development on
our Trac
roadmap.
Got feedback?
If you have any overall feedback, please visit
the Gallery
3.0 Alpha 3 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have
questions, please visit
the Gallery 3 Wiki,
the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.