We asked and you responded! The needs of our users are key motivators for us, so given all of the very encouraging feedback from the Future of Gallery 1 story, we have decided to continue the development of Gallery 1 and release Gallery 1.6. Jens (aka Tim_j) and the whole Gallery team thank you for your continued support!

The next steps for Gallery 1.6 are a comprehensive security audit, followed by a release candidate. But before those can happen we need some help from you! Thus, this week is the Week of Gallery 1.6. During this week, we need your help picking through the latest pre-release of Gallery 1.6 to find bugs, inconsistencies, design issues and to notice any features you want to see that are missing. After trying to incorporate all of your feedback, the security audit will begin after which there will be no more major changes or features added. It's very important that you give your feedback now!

Please download the latest pre-release of 1.6 from Jens' archive and test it as much as you can. Post all the feedback you can provide in this Gallery 1.6 feedback thread so that the developers can respond to it and make Gallery 1.6 better for you. Thoughts about layout and design, bug reports, and any and all other comments are welcome!

A new and updated version of the Gallery Appliance has been made available. Thanks to the help of rPath, the new appliance includes Gallery 1.5.6 and Gallery 2.2.1.

Improvements include:

• Updated Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 versions
• More Gallery modules enabled, and Downloadable Plugins are also available.
• SCSI emulation instead of IDE emulation makes it possible to run on VMWare ESX server.
• rPath Appliance Platform (rAP) agent for remote appliance administration
• Increased number of build types. The Appliance is now downloadable for several virtual and non-virtual environments

Go Download the appliance and be sure to check the documentation for more details.
For more details, please read on!

A few months back we released a preview for Gallery 1.6. This contained many new features including access keys, a template system, captcha support, and group support but it also is a dramatic change in the code and layout handling. To this date we have received almost no feedback on these new features. Without any feedback, it is hard for us to know if it still makes sense for us to release Gallery 1.6, especially in light of the fact that it is significantly different from Gallery 1.5. Please read on!

The Gallery team is proud to announce the students that have been selected to participate in the 2007 Google Summer of Code. We are very pleased by the quality of the applications for the selected projects, and are really looking forward to working with these students over the summer. Thank you to all the students who sent proposals, and all the mentors who volunteered to participate!

Gallery 1.5.6 is now available for download. This is primarily a bug fix release but also includes a couple of minor new features. Even though this release contains no security fixes, we recommend that all users of Gallery 1.5.5-pl1 and earlier upgrade to this release to be as bug free as possible. You can download 1.5.6 from the Gallery 1 download page on SourceForge. Upgrade instructions are available on our documentation site.

Gallery 2.2.1 (Double Double) is now available for download! In what has been close to a year of development, the Gallery team has packed this release full of new features and security enhancements. Major new features include: Downloadable Plugins which let you download, install, and upgrade modules and themes through the web interface; Dynamic Albums which let you set up albums based on keywords, ratings, and more; and WebDAV support for managing your photo library like a network hard drive with folders of images.

Changes between 2.2 and 2.2.1: Gallery 2.2.1 is a patch release to address four relatively minor issues in Gallery 2.2:

• Fix the plugin administration page for Italian and Danish locales.
• Fix Downloadable Plugins to prevent upgrading to incompatible plugins.
• Make the authentication step of the installation and upgrade wizards more resilient against interference from other PHP scripts running on your site.
• Fix conflict between WebDAV and other short URLs.

As a patch release, Gallery 2.2.1 does not contain any new features. Upgrading from 2.2 to 2.2.1 is quick and easy. Please read on for all the changes introduced in the major Gallery 2.2 release and for upgrade instructions from earlier versions...