Zenphoto

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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• Changed the way images are returned. Should drastically reduce CPU time used (a big issue for Dreamhost users). [trisweb]
• Fixed bug with installation paths containing the string 'zen'; refined path resolution more. [trisweb]
• Fixed several critical vulnerabilities and security issues. [trisweb]
• Minor cosmetic path fix— /page/1 should never be seen now. [trisweb]
• Root domain and subdomain installations now work. For mod_rewrite, use RewriteBase / [trisweb]

• Fixed an embarrasing bug in template-functions.php where an empty Gallery would cause failures. [luckyspin]

• Added Album sorting. Default is by filename, but you can drag and drop your preferred order manually. [luckyspin]
• Added [refresh] link to Gallery stats, you can now manually reset your stats and clean up your DB tables. [trisweb]
• Added Gallery sorting. Default is newest first, but you can drag and drop your preferred order. [luckyspin]
• Added deletion of images and albums in admin. [trisweb]
• Added email notification to the admin user when comments are posted. [luckyspin]
• Admin: Created admin functions to clean up admin page(s). [luckyspin]
• Admin: Created an upgrade page to migrate db tables to new schema. [luckyspin]
• Admin: Spruced up some of the admin pages to their L&F was consistent. [luckyspin]
• Improved path resolution; please report any bugs you run into! [trisweb]

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First, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 fairly smoothly, and I have to ask, how exactly did they manage to make the admin interface uglier than it was before? I don’t mean to be harsh… I like most of the rest of it–except the image upload addition–it will drive me to create a ZP-WP plugin to replace it ASAP.

Anyway, zenphoto development has been very active recently. You can all thank Todd Papaioannou for his hard work on drag-n-drop sorting. Take a look at his posts describing the new features on his site. I think I can improve the interface a bit, but the functionality is all there and working beautifully.

We’re planning on a release early next week with sorting, image and album deletion in the control panel, e-mail comment notification, and possibly RSS as well. Keep checking (...)

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Upon seeing this post by John Berry at Agile Partners, (through Michael Heilemann, thanks!) I couldn’t resist applying it to an actual photo album.

Without further ado, here’s a zenphoto theme that uses a Scriptaculous slider to resize photos, just like iPhoto.

Slidaculous Resizing Zenphoto

Credit where credit is due: I copied the code exactly as written in John’s post, then modified it for a little extra efficiency, and used zenphoto’s size-in-the-URL trick to progressively load higher resolutions as you slide. Yeah, I did say that. Try it out.

This is a testament to zenphoto’s flexibility. There’s no reason one couldn’t continue to add more scriptaculous effects.

• Removed web_path and server_path config variables. They are now automatically deduced (and there was much rejoicing).
• Added theme functions: getPrevImageThumb() and getNextImageThumb() - return the path
  to the thumbnail of the previous or next image relative to the current image.
• Fixed bugs with using next_image() (for iterating through all album images) on an image page. You should now be able to use any loop anywhere without affecting the state.
• [Bug 005102] Images smaller than the standard image size will not be sized up anymore.
• [Bug 005125] AJAX-editing no longer strips HTML from titles/descriptions.
• [Bug 005086] Using zenphoto without mod_rewrite should work fine now.

Thank you all for the wonderful response to the release of the zenphoto beta (read the post below, or go to zenphoto.org to grab it).

zenphoto support forums

Of course, like any beta release, it’s a bit hard to install, and is pretty inconsistent over different platforms, so I’ve opened up the forums so you can get help easier and faster. If you need help, just start a new thread there. If you want to help give support, please create an account and start helping people out. I’d appreciate it greatly.

There were a few common installation problems people have experienced:

• The ‘albums’ directory cannot be found or is not readable means that you have your ’server_path’ variable wrong. This thread shows how to find out the right (...)

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