Gallery 3.0 Beta 1 is ready!

Gallery 3 is finally in beta! We've been hard at work over the past 8 months designing and building a worthy successor to the Gallery line and we are happy to say that we've got something that we think will make you very happy. The big news for this release is that from this point on, we will support upgrades to future releases! But don't take our word for it, download it now!

Intended audience

Gallery 3 Beta 1 is not a finished product, yet. We still have a lot of polishing left to do on it. But most of the big pieces are in place and it's beginning to really shine. Even in its incomplete state, it is a stable and reliable product. If you're looking to move forward and you're willing to live a little bit on the edge, now is the time. If you're excited about creating beautiful themes and writing your own custom modules, now is a great time to get involved!

Security warning

We've commissioned a professional audit from our good friends over at Gotham Digital Science and they gave us a list of security flaws in the product. We have fixed all the major flaws they uncovered. There are still some little issues left, but they are along the lines of "you should ask for the old password as a confirmation when you let users change their password". We'll fix them, but they're not fixed yet. Are all the security holes closed? We hope so, but history says that there are probably a few that we haven't uncovered yet. If you install Beta 1 on a public site, we encourage you to watch for new releases and be prepared to upgrade when we put out security fixes.

Let's go!

With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 Beta 1 (1.2 MB) or retrieve directly from our revision control with git clone git://github.com/gallery/gallery3.git

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.

  We made tough decisions early on to make the product leaner and faster for you. For example, we got rid of photo-level permissions and provide them only at the album level. This makes the app faster and easier to maintain while simplifying the UI and removing a feature that most don't use.

• Simplicity - We've got some great 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 4.4MB (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 customizable - 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 so if you know HTML and PHP you can start hacking today.

• Easily extendable - 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 5.2.3. 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 configuration.

What's new in this release?

• Support for upgrading to further releases (beta 1)
• Full HTTPS support (beta 1)
• Use the EXIF caption as the photo description (beta 1)
• Support for installs into non-empty databases (beta 1)
• Gallery 2 Import now imports comments, sort orders, keywords, tags, timestamps and more (beta 1)
• Photo and album names are editable (beta 1)
• Big improvements to the Organize (bulk editing) feature including drag and drop, mass rotation and album highlights (beta 1)
• Advanced settings editor (beta 1)
• Greatly improved permissions interface (beta 1)
• Improved localization client UI allowing to translate plurals (beta 1)
• Performance improvements (beta 1)
• 85 closed tickets in the beta 1 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

Roadmap

From the beta release onwards we'll be working on polishing up what we already have. We will try to restrain ourselves from adding lots of new features and will focus on stability so that we can release it to you sooner.. A few things that we know that we'll be adding include:

• Photo printing support
• More capabilities in the Organize feature
• Import permissions from Gallery 2
• Remap Gallery 2 urls to Gallery 3
• Improved tagging support
• Basic embedding hooks / instructions
• (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)
• Bulk editing of albums and photos (partially available in beta 1)

You can track development on our Trac roadmap.

Got feedback?

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Beta 1 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.