ZenPhoto

The last days we suffered an annoying flood of spam posts that were pretending interesst. However, their only reason was to gain SEO ranking via the website link that can be attached to the forum profile on our “cost”.

It is hard to tell what post are actually serious and we have no time or motivation to check every poster’s profile. Therefore we have now disabled the display of any website link attached to your profiles.

Since the danger is that we ignore serious posts or accidentally delete them please make your posts explicit so we can see that you have real interesst.

Thanks for understanding.

Update:
Also please note that we WILL delete vaccuous comment posts as those are likely to be from these spammers. If you wish your post to stay, say something real.

Additionally we have now also disabled the public display of the forum profiles as we noted that spammers link to those via Twitter etc. regarding the profile website link now.

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Yeah, you read correctly. Zenphoto has been around for five years now. We can’t quite believe it ourselves and are glad that we managed the important 1.3 release for Zenphoto’s birthday.

Let us take a quick look at how it all started:

On April 24, 2005 Zenphoto’s original developer, Tristan Harward, posted the ambitious idea of “Reinventing the photo album” on his blog trisweb.com.

The very first announcement already with name and logo appeared on May 27th, 2005. We consider this as the “birth” of Zenphoto, that is why we wanted to release 1.3 on this date. Take your time and read the PDF of the specifications posted there. Much of it we have now!

The first 0.1 preview was released on June 4th, 2005 and on April 25th, 2006 Zenphoto 1.0 beta gets an honorable mention on the Web 2.0 awards. Take a look at the old Zenphoto admin backend here.

2006-2007 Zenphoto saw a quite active development and its community grew with forum, bugtracker and website. We have assembled a collection of screenshots of the old site here.

We of course don’t want to bore with listing them all. You can still read the old development posts on http://www.trisweb.com/archives/category/zenphoto/. The changelog can also be viewed on zenphoto.org.

However, after the 1.0.8.2 release development got in a kind of hiatus, so that in mid 2007 the community started the so called “community build” that incorporated many of the community features into the 1.0.8.2 release. This eventually lead to the founding of a new core development team which then released the long awaited 1.1 version.

This small but effective development team still runs Zenphoto with the welcome help of the community. On to the hopefully next five years! If you like leave a testimonial on the anniversary forum thread.

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We have scheduled the 1.3.0 release for May 27th. There are some significant new capabilities in this release including, but not limited to:

• Imagick support
• Custom menu creation
• Disk quota management
• Limitations on the number of images that may be uploaded to an album
• Tags from album
• Sitemap
• seo_locale
• jCarousel thumb navigation
• Individual image watermarks
• Zenpage password protection
• Custom authentication implementations are now supported
• Wordpress importer (Admin utility)

You do not have to wait for the 1.3.0 release to start experiencing these features. Download the Nightly build and see what is there. There is still time for improvements to these features. Try them out and help us to sort out possible bugs. Let us know on the bugtracker or the forum.

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Note: This is of course an April Fool’s joke..:-)

We have long thought about this and we don’t do it lightheartedly but we will not provide the free and extensive support we have provided in the past anymore. Therefore we will close down the public forum by the end of this month.

Instead we will provide paid support only for users who sign in for monthly subscriptions. We are following the trend of paid content as exemplified by formerly free websites of newspapers like the London Times.

We appreciate the positive feedback of our users. However donations have become less and less over the last year while the traffic due to the success of Zenphoto raises our server costs constantly. Of course, there is also the hours we spend developing Zenphoto that are currently unrequited. We feel that this change is in line with what the “free software definition” says:

“‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’”

We hope you can understand that we have to do this to be able to further develope the best gallery CMS out there for many years to come. Zenphoto itself of course will still be downloadable for free.

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Zenphoto used the jQuery Thickbox script as default “box” script for quite some time.  Since Thickbox has been abandoned by its developer and the coming Zenphoto 1.2.9 will feature the brand new jQuery 1.4 Thickbox will be replaced by the Colorbox script.

So if you use a customized standard theme and included the Thickbox script as often told by us from zp-core/js you should now update your theme to either use the Thickbox from elsewhere or the new Colorbox. The standard themes — especially the Zenpage theme — have already been updated for tonight’s nightly build.

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We’re pleased to announce the release of Zenphoto 1.2.8. The changelog is the same as the Release Candidate a short time ago.

We recommend everyone upgrade to this release as soon as possible. As always, you can download it from the front page of zenphoto.org.

Hope everyone has a happy new year!

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The first release candidate for Zenphoto 1.2.8 is now available for download and testing from our download page. Please note that we have taken down the official 1.2.7 release as we feel the RC is more stable. This mainly because of the recent quite major bug discovery.

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It just has been discovered that under certain circumstances all of your image descriptions could be cleared if you refresh the meta data. This could happen if you have Exif/IPTC data in the image but not a description. The same applies to the title.

We therefore strongly advise anyone to backup the database before any update to 1.2.7 and before any meta data refresh. You could of course also try the nightly build where this issue has been fixed.

Since we are a small team we have only one developement stream that is under continous developement so that we can’t provide a bugfix release inbetween. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

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In case you have not noted we have done some restructuring on the site, mainly on the extensions section.

We have divided the former “collection” posts that contained several extensions into separate posts now. This way you can easier search using the categories and the newly introduced tags for extensions to find what extension you are looking for.

For the now slightly increased number of entries we have also installed a better page navigation.

Also some stuff has been moved to the user guide section as it was not really about exensions but more tutorials. These are just these:

• One “Zenphoto into Wordpress integration tutorial” entry that was part of the former entry Wordpress Tools & Plugins.
• The zenphoto as a “plugin” way to use Zenphoto functions outside of Zenphoto that was part of the also former hacks, utilities & addons entry.

It is sadly not avoidable that this may break some links from older forum posts but we hope that you will find the new extensions section much more convenient.

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The Zenphoto team will be more or less unavailable to provide the usual fast support on the forum on these days.

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