ZenPhoto

Note: As a preface, this is an April Fool’s joke. Zenphoto is as active as ever, and we hope to keep making it even better.

With the release of our latest version, Zenphoto 1.2.4, and the perfection, stability and widespread use of our amazing software, we thought it would be a great time to discuss the schedule for Zenphoto. Here’s a general idea of what we expect for the year ahead.

Our plan is for a final point release in one or two months, as per our usual schedule. This will probably come around May or June 1st, and will be version 1.2.5.

This will be Zenphoto’s final release. We’ve decided that our software is decidedly feature complete and 100% working for its intended purpose. If we continue adding features, we will be going against our philosophy of bloat-free, simple photo software, and at some point we simply have to call it finished. With all due respect, Zenphoto has gone as far as it can with its current codebase.

This is why we believe that for all our users, moving to the Gallery project will be an excellent and logical option. The Gallery software has two more full-number versions than Zenphoto, and on the new third version, Gallery 3, they’ve finally realized everything that Zenphoto was from the beginning. With many years more experience than our team, we have every reason to believe they will be able to make a better gallery than Zenphoto ever was or will be.

After all, zenphoto was originally conceived as a replacement for gallery software like Coppermine and Gallery 1 and 2 which were large bloated applications full of features that displayed your photos and did your dishes too! We basically designed Zenphoto to be everything we desired in a “Gallery 3.” But now that the Gallery team is making “Gallery 3″ for real, like we always wanted – a simple, usable, and lightweight photo gallery designed for simply showing photos – Zenphoto’s “raison d’être” is no more! We’d like to thank the Gallery team for taking over all this hard work for us.

All the members of our team look forward to having much more time to enjoy on beautiful beaches in Hawaii and the Italian riviera, funded of course by the tens of millions of dollars in donations we’ve received from our generous users. Thanks to all of our users, and… ciao!

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Besides the release of Zenphoto 1.2.4 also our site saw some updates. The themes and the showcase sections have been reworked a little: You now can subscribe to RSS feeds for updates and also vote for your favorite theme or showcase site. Themes are now marked about their compatibility status to minimize surprises if trying an 3rd party theme that has not been updated in a year.

There is also now a new screenshots section which features some screenshots of the Zenphoto admin and of the Zenpage CMS plugin.

Also with Zenpage being an official plugin now the content of the now obsolete Zenpage project site has been moved to zenphoto.org. The only things that will be kept there will be the Zenpage default theme demo and the older version archive for now.

The new Zenpage resources:

• Zenpage plugin page including the tinyZenpage page content
• Troubleshooting Zenpage
• Zenpage theming tutorial (now part 4 of the Zenphoto tutorial)
• Screenshots (in the new screenshots section on zenphoto.org)
• Zenpage default theme demo (only exception, still to be found on the old link)

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• Passwords for protected images [sbillard]
• Setup improvements: File/folder permissions security [sbillard]
• Gallery statistics extended for tags and Zenpage items [acrylian]
• Mixed field/tag searches in boolean expressions [sbillard]
• Media RSS improvements, RSS for latest albums [acrylian]
• A little admin design modernization [acrylian]
• filter for comment posting [sbillard]
• plugins
  • New: Flowplayer 3 [acrylian]
  • Zenpage now included as official plugin
    • Performance improvements [sbillard]
    • More internal restructuring and integration with Zenphoto [sbillard,acrylian]
    • Content scheduling and expiration [sbillard, acrylian]
    • Some pure theme related plugin options moved to theme options [sbillard ,acrylian]
    • Zenpage setup integrated with main Zenphoto setup [sbillard]
    • Zenpage default theme
      • Homepage option to choose any unpublished page [sbillard,acrylian]
      • Thickbox theme option [acrylian]
  • paged_thumbs_nav: search mode support [acrylian]
  • contact_form: multilingual support [acrylian]
  • flvplayer: Now incorporates the former flv_playlist plugin [acrylian]
• and as always lots of minor bugfixes and improvements (full list)

Note: Some plugins that were included officially before have been removed from the package. They have actually been third party contributions by users that have gone elsewhere so we cannot support them anymore. These can now be found on the Zenphoto plugins page.

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