Software update: Gallery 2.3

Last week the final release of version 2.3 of Gallery was released. Gallery is a program written in PHP that can be used to create online photo albums. For example, unlike Jalbum, for example, the photos are stored in a database and a web server is needed to run the whole thing. Others features for example, the Photo Management option that can automatically create thumbnails, rotate and resize photos, among other things. Furthermore, it is possible to assign read and/or write permissions to the albums and there are countless modules to further expand the possibilities or appearance to adjust.

New in version 2.3 includes an improved slideshow module, which is from PicLens is used, it is possible to use Akismet spam from the comments and there is support for version 3.x of SQLite. In addition, users can now set what they do and do not want to receive email notifications for, and various improvements have been made to the user interface that improve speed, among other things. Below is an overview of the most important changes in release 2.3:

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2.3 (Skidoo)

• New version of the slideshow module now uses PicLens to provide a rich, full screen slideshow.
• Comment module now offers moderation and Akismet support to help weed out spam comments.
• New email notification module allowing users to configure events they wish to get notified for. You can watch albums for changes, items for new comments, etc.
• New Jpegtran module to support rotation and cropping of jpeg images with no loss in image quality.
• New SnapGalaxy module for prints from snapgalaxy.com.
• Registration module can now send a welcome email to new users upon account activation.
• EXIF block now uses AJAX to switch between summary and detail display.
• External image block now has a “rawImage” mode to return a single binary image instead of HTML output.
• Support in RSS module for Media RSS format and random RSS streams.
• Remote module now bundles the Gallery Remote client and makes it available via Java Web Start. Users with a Java enabled browser can then launch Gallery Remote with a single click instead of manually downloading and installing.
• Hybrid theme now uses automatic navigation between pages in its image viewer and slideshow. This means the slideshow will show all images in the album, moving between album pages as needed. Requesting the next/previous image in the image viewer will also load a new album page as needed.
• Webcam module now accepts file:// URLs to retrieve image from local filesystem.
• Dcraw module now supports Adobe Digital Negative (dng) files, when used with dcraw v7.0 or newer.
• Added support for Windows Vista in PublishXP module.
• New database backup feature. Backup at start or upgrade, or anytime from Site Admin / Maintenance. Restore a backup from lib/support interface.
• Can now put Gallery into maintenance mode from Site Admin / Maintenance. Setting in config.php file is still available too.
• New event logging system records Gallery errors, viewable in the Site Admin interface.
• Themes can now override module template files, allowing a themed look to more aspects of the application.
• New Language Manager that allows the addition or removal of translations.
• User interface changes.
  • Use AJAX to speed up deleting comments(spam) on items/albums.
  • Use quick DHTML confirm dialog for deleting single items. Dialog offers link to bulk delete several items from an album.
  • Use YUI ItemTree instead of plain select box to select target album when moving items, creating replicas or link items.
• Performance and stability improvements.
  • Smarty templates now permanently cached by default. Turn this off in Site Admin / Performance when working on tpl files, so changes take effect immediately during development.
  • Avoid reading EXIF ​​data multiple times in Carbon theme.
  • Some added caching in GalleryUrlGenerator.
  • Use progress bar when adding items to avoid server or browser timeouts. Particularly helpful when adding many items from local server.
  • Restructuring to greatly reduce the number of directories for language files.
  • Refactor of translator hints to avoid some processing when translations are not used (en_US).
  • Faster plugin and language package downloads.
  • Refactor of event system working towards a performance improvement in the next release.
• New database options.
  • Support for SQLite 3.x
  • Support for PostgreSQL schemas
• New install package options.
  • English only variants or installation downloads. The minimum is English only. In addition, Typical and Full are available in English language only variants.
  • Greatly reduced the number of directories for language files.
• Upgraded to newer versions of several bundled software packages: YUI! 2.3.1, ADOdb 4.98, Smarty 2.6.20, GetID3 1.7.7, BBCode 0.3.3.
• Many bugs fixed.

[break] Gallery 2.3 – email notification configuration.