Gallery 3.0 Alpha 4 is ready!

It's here, the latest technology preview for Gallery 3. In the last 6 weeks we've been busy fixing bugs and adding features. The original plan called for us to have a beta release by now, but that's taking a little longer than expected so we'd like to share the Alpha 4 release with you now so that you can continue to play with the product and give us your feedback. In a hurry? download it now!

Intended audience

Alpha 4 isn't quite game ready yet. We've still got big changes to make so this technology preview is still aimed at enthusiasts, designers and module developers. But if you're interested, this is the perfect time to do a test drive with the improved user interface and to start developing feature extensions and designing new themes.

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 go!

With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 Alpha 4 (1.2 MB) or retrieve directly from the SourceForge repository:

svn co http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/tags/RELEASE_3_0_ALPHA_4

The Gallery 3 Philosophy

Gallery 3.0 is easy and fun to customize. We have made every effort to make it much easier for the casual developer to hack on the product. You don't need a computer science degree to do something really cool with it! And 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 were 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. It's highly targetted.

  Prudent decisions helped to simplify the product at a very early stage. For instance, there are no longer photo-level permissions. Permissions are managed on an album level. Most of our users don't effectively use photo-level permissions and this simplification extends from the database up to the user interface.

• Simplicity - We're glad to have usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense. 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 4.3MB (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 is made possible by some truly great advances in technology.

  • We evaluated many PHP frameworks before choosing Kohana. It makes PHP application development simple and fast. Thanks to the Kohana folks for providing this first class application framework!

  • PHP 5. We're taking advantage of many of the new features and capabilities available in the latest versions of PHP. This allows us to write less code and have a faster product.

  • We're using jQuery to create the rich user interactions in the browser that make the application fast and light. Especially with with jQuery UI and a host of plugins, UI development couldn't be more hassle-free.

• Easily customizeable - Did you know you can create your own theme just by copying an existing theme to a new folder? How's that for easy? There's no new templating language.. if you know HTML and PHP you can start hacking today.

• Simple to extend - We've worked hard to keep things simple. You can write your own module complete with installer, menus and theme integration in just a few lines of code. And to make life easier, we've created a Developer module that gives you a point and click way to create your own modules.

• Fewer configurations - We support Gallery 3 on Unix running MySQL 5, Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.2. By restricting the number of platforms that we support, we can put out high quality releases faster. Gallery 3 may work with MySQL 4.1, IIS and other platforms but the Gallery team is going to focus its energy on making the best possible product on the supported configurations.

What's new in this release?

• Bulk editing interface (alpha 4)
• Gallery 2 to Gallery 3 import (alpha 4)
• Tag management for admins (alpha 4)
• 41 closed tickets in the alpha 4 release
• 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)
• 58 closed tickets in the alpha 3 release
• 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 (partially available in alpha 4)
• A migration path from Gallery 2 (partially available in alpha 4)
• 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 4 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.