Zenphoto

Following the mantra “Release early, release often” I’ve followed up 1.0.5 with (logically enough) 1.0.6! This release is small, but includes some good fixes for sorting, so I’m sure you want to upgrade!

On another note, I’ll be migrating to a VPS (“practically my own server”) hosting plan sometime this holiday season, so you might see some downtime, but probably not. Since I’m in no rush this time, the switch should be seamless. No rush also meant I could search and research (search again) all I wanted, and I believe I found a really great hosting company to stick with. One good sign is that they’re currently sold out, expecting more servers this week (so they don’t oversell, which is a Good Thing). After I get it set up, I’ll re-install Confluence and JIRA and Zenphoto will have its bug tracker and Wiki back up!

Go download 1.0.6! Install it! It’s (...)

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• Bug: image sorting within albums fixed (getImageId() not found error). [trisweb]
• Bug: image dimensions are now cached in the database again (no functional difference, but much faster). [trisweb]
• Changed the default RewriteBase in .htaccess to /zenphoto to correspond with the default folder in the package. [trisweb]
• Now detects changed images and reprocesses them if the cached versions are old. [trisweb]
• When an image cannot be found/loaded, an error image is shown instead of no image (passing i.php?...&debug disables this and shows the error output) [trisweb]
• Other minor bugfixes and code cleanups.

Just in case you don’t check the home page or forums, zenphoto 1.0.5 has been released with a ton of fixes (since 1.0.3). 1.0.5 was a quick fix for an overlooked little problem, all the real meat was in 1.0.4.

Big changes include:

• Performance Improvements — lazy evaluation and some smart algorithms to sort the image array out of the database contribute to up to 12 times faster page processing in albums with lots of images.
• Database Generalization — all data storage has been abstracted to a PersistentObject class, which the Image and Album classes inherit from. This reduces specific database calls, groups them together, and allows for easy addition of new classes and new database systems later on. This is a Good Thing.
• New Themes included — I’ve included three new themes with the default release: Default Dark, Stoppeddesign, and Sterile. More choices! Yay.

The other big (...)

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• 1.0.4 was littered with PHP short tags by accident (an SVN reversion somehow happened), now fixed. [trisweb]
• No other changes.

Relevant links:

• trisweb.com - Zenphoto 1.0.5 Released

• Backend performance improvements! Zenphoto is now up to 10 times faster at rendering album and image pages with extremely large albums, and at least three times as fast for moderately-sized ones. [trisweb]
• Fixed bug where clicking the album or gallery in the breadcrumb would always go to page 1 [trisweb]
• Fixed a bug with database constraint naming conflicts with multiple installations [trisweb]
• Added an ini_set to try to adjust PHP's memory limit (may allow for larger images to be processed). [trisweb]
• Better and more secure comment input filtering from the kses library. [Niels Leehneer]
• Database access code abstracted and refactored. All (most) queries are now generalized through a new database class: PersistentObject. [trisweb]
• Bugfixes in saving of "Place" field - formerly overwrote the title (oops) [trisweb]
• Sub-albums half implemented (for TESTING ONLY). Use the Sub-Albums Test Theme to try (...)

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Ahh the smell of fresh code in the morning…

Just released zp 1.0.3. It’s got lots of new features and about a million bugfixes, so defininitely upgrade soon if you can. Get it at zenphoto.org as usual.

The coolest part of this release is a huge rework of i.php, the image processor. While it used to only have some limited resizing options (longest side, width, or cropped thumbnail), now it does anything you darn well want it to. You can specify exact width and height and crop dimensions and position. As of now, it’s kinda hard to formulate the input URLs for everyday use, but plugin authors and theme developers should find the new options pretty much awesome. If you want to know more about how it (...)

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• Added more image size options to i.php (custom sizes and crops) [trisweb]
• Added ability to get image size/orientation from a theme (see documentation) [trisweb]
• Width and height attributes now filled in theme images (page loading looks much better) [trisweb]
• Changed name of a function that conflicts with WordPress (is_valid_email) [trisweb]
• Special characters in file and folder names should now work (with or without mod_rewrite) [trisweb]
• Fixed several critical vulnerabilities and security issues. [trisweb]
• Support for UTF-8 and any other desired character set added. [Niels Leehneer]
• Added way for themes to have custom pages. Use index.php?p=page in your theme for access to /themes/yourtheme/page.php [trisweb]
• Many other bugs fixed: View All

I’m pleased to announce two new additions to the Zenphoto community:

The Zenphoto Wiki (wiki.zenphoto.org)

The Zenphoto Bugtracker (bugs.zenphoto.org)

If you use zenphoto, and especially if you develop themes or plugins, we’d love to have you help out with documentation, support, bug-catching… anything you can find time for. Also, we’ve officially cut our ties with berlios, so you don’t ever need to go back there.

So make some accounts and have fun!

I’m pleased to announce the release of zenphoto 1.0.2 beta! This is an important security release, so everyone using zenphoto should upgrade as soon as possible. Head over to zenphoto.org for the download and changelog.

The major changes in this release include:

• Security fixes and improvements
• Rework of the image serving model–now images are redirected straight from cache (to let apache deal with them) rather than being served through PHP. This should eliminate complaints from certain hosts about CPU cycles, and generally makes everything much faster. Images are still created and returned through the URL as before.
• Path bugs are fixed, please let us know if you encounter any problems. However, if you do need to override the paths manually, there’s now a place at the bottom of config.php for it.
• Root installs now work (but are limited to one (...)

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For some reason, zenphoto got an honorable mention in this year’s Web 2.0 awards! I was quite surprised to find that email in-between the spam in my Hotmail account.

We got the award for the “Photos & Digital Imaging” category, in the shadows of such greats as Flickr and, well, Flickr. Hopefully people see the value in an open-source self-hosted alternative to the big guy, so we’ll keep working on making it even more than that (seriously, we’re working on it for real now :-) ).

And of course, the best part is that we get to show this:

While we’re still on the subject, we have a release coming tomorrow. Lots of bugfixes and security patches. Make sure to check it out. Update: tomorrow’s release delayed until tomorrow (today). It’s all set, just need to do the site changes and I’m out of time. (...)

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