trisweb.com

To all Zenphoto users – Zenphoto has a new release out yet again, 1.1.3! This version has much improved setup, which now does a systems check and lets you know if anything needs to be fixed before installation. It’s much easier and more intuitive than before, so it should help anyone get started easily. There are many other improvements and bugfixes as well, but instead of talking about them here, I’m going to direct you to the release entry on the new Zenphoto.org web site!

That’s right, Zenphoto.org has a new design and new useful features, like a blog, theme browser, and showcase gallery that shows off some great Zenphoto installations from around the web. The new site was designed and developed by Malte (acrylian) and Mark (aitf311) and looks excellent! Make sure to go check it out.

Since Zenphoto has a new blog, the release announcements will now be made there instead of here. I’ll keep making entries here for each release right now, but please switch your RSS feeds to the new one, located here: http://www.zenphoto.org/category/release/feed/. It should be the main source for Zenphoto information from now on. The main blog can also be found at http://www.zenphoto.org/category/News/.

Congratulations yet again to the Zenphoto team for the new site and another great release. We hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays!

Following last week’s highly successful and well-reviewed 1.1 release, we’re already keeping up with the bug fixes and improvements.

1.1.2 is a small release that fixes all the reported bugs from 1.1 so far, including some bad installation problems with 1.1.1. It also adds a few useful features. You can read more about it and download it on Zenphoto’s home page, as usual.

Go to Zenphoto.org to download or read more.

Update: 1.1.2 released on 11/8/2007 to fix the installation bugs. If you tried 1.1.1 and it didn’t work, try again with 1.1.2, it should be fine.

I am happy to announce, on behalf of the Zenphoto development team, the release of Zenphoto 1.1!

Go get zenphoto 1.1 now!

First, I’d like to give a warning to upgraders—you’ll need to move your zp-config.php file from the /zen/ folder to the new /zp-core/ folder. We just renamed it, but I know that’s going to be confusing, so I’m reiterating it everywhere I can. After the upgrade you should delete the /zen/ folder.

Ok, now that’s done, here’s what’s new in this release:

• Sub-Albums – fully supported in the Admin and all themes.
• Tags – enter tags in a text field on albums or images, and then you can…
• Search! Searches within tags, album titles/descriptions, image titles/descriptions, and other text fields.
• RSS Feeds for the gallery and albums.
• EXIF/IPTC reading and display – IPTC Titles and descriptions are loaded when images are loaded, EXIF is displayed in a nice table.
• Video support (.flv, etc.) by Zenvideo
• Preliminary Plugin support
• Sp@m filtering for comments
• Geospatial visualization – maps photos by geocoded metadata onto a Google map.
• Image archives by date
• Even more, lots more.

Wow. That’s a lot of new features. And what’s even more incredible is that I cannot take responsibility for any of them. I helped out here and there, but mostly did nothing, as I still don’t have the time to dedicate. The release was made possible by many people, but I want to thank Stephen B. (sbillard), Mark (aitf311), and Malte (acrylian) in particular because they did by far the most work for 1.1.

I know I am never satisfied with anything; I feel like a bad parent to this project sometimes, when at some point I simply should let go and let the new team have their own spotlight. This is that moment. They deserve all the credit and more for the great things in Zenphoto 1.1, while I take full blame for the delay in getting it to you all. There are still some known issues, but none of them are important enough to hold up a release. I apologize for that, and I hope I can do better in the future.

This is truly a great achievement, and I am truly impressed with how it has come together. Look forward to more releases in the future with less time in-between, and for now, enjoy your photographs as displayed by Zenphoto. Thank you.

[Note: due to a bug in Wordpress (which is fixed in 2.3.1 which I just upgraded to) this post couldn’t be in the zenphoto category and the ‘Release Announcements’ category at the same time. Sorry if those of you subscribed to the ‘zenphoto’ feed didn’t hear about it until now!]

Zenphoto 1.0.8.2 was released quietly yesterday. Yep, there’s a .2 after that! Like you’d expect from software released without unit testing, we encountered several little bugs in the 1.0.8 version, followed by another bug in 1.0.8.1, hence, 1.0.8.2, which is now looking good.

Download Zenphoto 1.0.8.2 Here!

This is a larger release than the minor point makes it seem, with many changes to the core code and how things work under the hood. Read the changelog for more juicy info, or check Trac for constant updates. Read below for sweet details about this big point release…

Following the mantra “Release early, release often” I’ve followed up 1.0.5 with (logically enough) 1.0.6! This release is small, but includes some good fixes for sorting, so I’m sure you want to upgrade!

On another note, I’ll be migrating to a VPS (“practically my own server”) hosting plan sometime this holiday season, so you might see some downtime, but probably not. Since I’m in no rush this time, the switch should be seamless. No rush also meant I could search and research (search again) all I wanted, and I believe I found a really great hosting company to stick with. One good sign is that they’re currently sold out, expecting more servers this week (so they don’t oversell, which is a Good Thing). After I get it set up, I’ll re-install Confluence and JIRA and Zenphoto will have its bug tracker and Wiki back up!

Go download 1.0.6! Install it! It’s easy!

Just in case you don’t check the home page or forums, zenphoto 1.0.5 has been released with a ton of fixes (since 1.0.3). 1.0.5 was a quick fix for an overlooked little problem, all the real meat was in 1.0.4.

Big changes include:

• Performance Improvements—lazy evaluation and some smart algorithms to sort the image array out of the database contribute to up to 12 times faster page processing in albums with lots of images.


• Database Generalization—all data storage has been abstracted to a PersistentObject class, which the Image and Album classes inherit from. This reduces specific database calls, groups them together, and allows for easy addition of new classes and new database systems later on. This is a Good Thing.


• New Themes included—I’ve included three new themes with the default release: Default Dark, Stoppeddesign, and Sterile. More choices! Yay.

The other big change of course I am not advertizing, since it’s not fully implemented yet, and that is sub-albums. The code now supports them. However, the interface for managing them is still under development. You can download the sub-albums testing theme if you don’t mind the incompleteness just to see how it works, but don’t expect much yet.

Also, there’s a big problem with sorting images in this release. See this thread for more information and a temporary fix if you need it. I’ll be releasing 1.0.6 this week to fix it for good, and I’m adding unit testing to my list of things to do.

Zenphoto is back!

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 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!