trisweb.com

Ahh the smell of fresh code in the morning…

Just released zp 1.0.3. It’s got lots of new features and about a million bugfixes, so defininitely upgrade soon if you can. Get it at zenphoto.org as usual.

The coolest part of this release is a huge rework of i.php, the image processor. While it used to only have some limited resizing options (longest side, width, or cropped thumbnail), now it does anything you darn well want it to. You can specify exact width and height and crop dimensions and position. As of now, it’s kinda hard to formulate the input URLs for everyday use, but plugin authors and theme developers should find the new options pretty much awesome. If you want to know more about how it works, check out this wiki article I wrote.

Now that this release is out, we should be able to ride it for a while and work on more than just fixing bugs; we’ll work on features like subalbums, for example. Another thing to look forward to: some amazing speed improvements. I guess that’s what you get when you’re slightly detail-obsessive and annoyed by something a little lacking… heck, that’s how ZP started in the first place! (And while we’re on the subject, why can’t WordPress get my line breaks right?? Details, people, details…)

Now that I’m graduated I’ll have a little time to spare to keep working on this thing. It’s really pretty rewarding and worthwhile, actually, so thanks to all of you for using it and enjoying it (I hope). Now, since it is zenphoto, I leave you with a couple photos.

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!

This is just a test of ZenPress, a great new Zenphoto+Wordpress plugin by Alessandro Morandi. If you run both, give it a shot It’s exactly what I had planned to make, but never had the time. So far it’s working great. Read the discussion on the forums if you want more background.

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 access path when using mod_rewrite, eg: you can’t access the same gallery from trisweb.com/photos and photos.trisweb.com).

So there are some good security fixes (go upgrade now if you haven’t yet), and lots of improvements. This should be a very stable and generally good release. Enjoy!

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. Thanks for your patience.

I’m happy to announce the release of the zenphoto 1.0 beta! This release brings a lot of hard work from a new member of the team, Todd Papaioannou. Since he did most of the work for this release (and he did, believe me) I’ll let him do the explaining.

Head to luckyspin.org for his post,

Or go straight to zenphoto.org to grab the release.

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 here for more updates.

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.