Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 is ready!

Four weeks ago we released Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 and we're happy to say that the response continues to be overwhelmingly positive. The community support and feedback about features that you'd like to see in the product has been outstanding, and you've helped us track down many issues large and small in the code. To encourage your continued support and patience we're releasing Alpha 3 which has significant improvements!

Intended audience

The Alpha 3 release is still intended for enthusiasts, designers and module developers. This is the right time to do a test drive with the improved user interface and to start developing feature extensions and designing new themes.

Note there is still no upgrade path from Gallery 2 to Gallery 3, nor is there an upgrade path from earlier Gallery 3 Alphas to Alpha 3. Yes, an upgrade is coming but no, it hasn't been a high enough priority yet.

Security warning

This is a technology preview of Gallery 3.0 and as such it is not intended to be installed on public websites yet. The application has undergone a professional security audit, which has identified some security vulnerabilities and will be fixed before the final release. Please resist the temptation to share your test drive with the world and wait for the final release first!

Let's get the download

With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 (1.1 MB) or retrieve directly from the SourceForge repository:

svn co http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/trunk

The Gallery 3 Philosophy

Let's have a closer look at Gallery 3.0 to see why it's so easy and fun to customize. Our user centric development process ensures that the user interface is not an afterthought.

• Scope and target audience - Before starting development on Gallery 3.0, the target audience and the scope of the application have been clearly defined. Gallery 3 is not a general purpose web application handling any file format you throw at it. And it's not supported on every web platform that exists.

  Prudent decisions helped to simplify the product at a very early stage. For instance, there are no longer item-level permissions. Permissions are managed on an album level. This simplification extends from the database up to the user interface.

• Simple to use - We're glad to have usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense, avoiding the dreaded text deserts. The emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy. To see an example of this, check out the admin dashboard and the user/group administration page.

• Size matters - Gallery 3.0 is currently a mere 4.1MB (uncompressed on your disk), with all its features. Compare that to the 16.5MB of Gallery 2.3's bare bones minimal package. Leaving out some levels of abstraction really helps to lose some weight!

• On the shoulders of giants... - Gallery 3.0 wouldn't be possible without the great advances of recent years.

  • Gallery 3.0 is built on top of Kohana, a PHP 5 framework that makes PHP application development a breeze. Kudos to the folks from Kohana for their support and for providing this first class application framework!

  • Kohana's prowess in elegance and simplicity couldn't be achieved without the vast improvements of PHP 5 over PHP 4. We're glad we can finally seize the full power of PHP 5. Adios, PHP 4!

  • Remember the days before jQuery? We don't want to look back either :-) It has never easier to add interactivity, AJAX or other custom behaviors to your user interface than it is with jQuery. We use jQuery and jQuery UI widely and UI development couldn't be more hassle-free.

• Simple to customize - Gone are the days of learning 4 different languages (HTML, JavaScript, Smarty, PHP), many different APIs (theme and core API, Gallery 2 smarty tags) and 10 step tutorials to create your own theme. With Gallery 3, you can create your own theme just by copying an existing theme to a new folder. No further changes necessary to make it work. How's that for easy? There's no templating language to learn other than HTML and PHP.

• Simple to extend - We've exercised great restraint in keeping things simple and it shows in the small size of existing modules. For instance, it takes a small fraction of the code to create a slideshow or comments module for Gallery 3 than it took to implement the same feature set in Gallery 2.

• Supported configurations - Gallery 3 is supported on Linux / Unix servers, running MySQL 5 and an Apache 2.2 web server with PHP 5.2. Emphasis on supported, not necessarily required. It may well work with MySQL 4.1 on MS Windows as well, but the Gallery team is going to focus its energy on making the best possible product on the supported configurations.

Currently Implemented Features

We resolved 58 separate issues in this alpha 3 release including:

• Support for database table prefixes (alpha 3)
• Random image block for the sidebar (alpha 3)
• Module administration view (alpha 3)
• Added translation server and localization client (alpha 3)
• Reimplemented the Flash uploader using SWFUpload (alpha 3)
• Album sort orderers (alpha 3)
• Add photos directly from the web server (improved in alpha 3)
• User/group/permissions management UI (alpha 3)
• Auto-login at the end of the installer, with a welcome page (alpha 3)
• Moved Google Maps and Polar Rose modules out of the official package into the community repository (alpha 3)
• Localized UI with built-in editor (server side support is not finished) (alpha 2)
• RSS feed for comments (alpha 2)
• RSS feed for new images or movies (alpha 2)
• EXIF read support (alpha 2)
• Add photos directly from the web server (alpha 2)
• Support for uploading and viewing FLV movie files (alpha 2)
• Ability to view full size photos (alpha 2)
• Boolean and full text search (alpha 2)
• Album browsing
• Item commenting, comment moderation
• Spam protection with Akismet and Recaptcha
• Image toolkit support for ImageMagick, GD, and GraphicsMagick
• Theme system, including separate admin theme.
• Module system to extend the functionality, and a series of existing modules
• Basic metadata boolean search with relevance ranking
• Flash-powered slideshow (Cooliris)
• Album media RSS feeds
• Quick edits of item metadata
• In place item deletion and rotation
• User group management (drag & drop interface)
• Basic user permission management
• Admin dashboard with drag and drop blocks

Missing Key Features

These features are yet to be added and will be part of the final 3.0 release:

• Bulk editing of albums and photos
• A migration path from Gallery 2
• Improved permissions UI.
• Basic embedding hooks / instructions
• (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)

Roadmap

Gallery 3.0 has received a professional security audit from our good friends over at Gotham Digital Science. They've dissected the code and probed it for security vulnerabilities, and then reported back to us. We have not yet addressed all of their concerns in this release, but we will resolve all security issues they discovered before the final release. Your security is important to us!

You can track development on our Trac roadmap.

Got feedback?

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.