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After almost exactly three years which went by since we picked up the development of PonyGallery ML as a hobby, we have reached -right on time on Xmas eve 2008- one of our primary long term goals: The release of JoomGallery 1.0.0 Stable.
This release is a special one to us, not only because we've been working towards it for such long time, but also because it marks a new beginning and a "good bye" all at the same time:
As you may know, the Joomla! team around Wilco Jansen will stop supporting Joomla! 1.0.x on July 22nd 2009. We thus decided to begin saying farewell to JoomGallery 1.0.0 (for Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x Legacy) although it barely got completed, and to devote our attention to forwarding the development
of JoomGallery 1.5, which runs natively under Joomla 1.5 and is currently BETA.
Of course, this doesn't mean that we won't continue to support JoomGallery 1.0.0 with minor improvements and bug fixes. The future, however, is clearly in favour of Joomla 1.5.x, and thereby also of JoomGallery 1.5, which is why we will now give priority to bringing it to a stable version as quickly as possible.
The idea to develop JoomGallery goes back to late 2006, when we noticed that PonyGallery ML was approaching it's limits in terms of scalability. Although the PonyGallery ML code served as the base for the new project, not much of is left by now. Most of it has been restructured and/or modernized, without, however, overly changing the basic look and feel of either back end or front end.
Ponygallery ML had/has quite a large community, and our intention hadn't been to reinvent the wheel rather than to create a smooth transition from PonyGallery ML to JoomGallery for all users, and on both platforms: Joomla! 1.0.x and Joomla! 1.5.x. Today's release, JoomGallery 1.0.0, represents an intermediate step in this process, and as such stands for both 'farewell' and 'new beginning'.
Regarding the changes in JoomGallery 1.0.0 since RC1, we were able to eliminate several bugs, thanks your contributions in the forum. (As usual, a list of these can be found in changelog.php).In
addition, saving the backend configuration is now handled by Javascript, with the advantage that unchanged options are left untouched and only changed options are written to the config file, which reduces the number of variables and potential conflicts with the Suhosin-Patch (which limits the passing of $POST data on many servers).
Other new features include JomSocial user profile support, the optional display of IPTC metadata in the Detail View of he gallery (provided that IPTC data are available in the image file, of course), as well as highlighting of minithumb images (by change of size at rollover events) in the back end and in user galleries.
And now it is time to say "thank you!" to you all, and to the entire Joomgallery
team.
I have rarely -no: I have never- had the pleasure to work with such a motivated, constructive, and well spirited team. By which i mean everyone, not only the core team of developers ...
- - aHa a.k.a. Andreas Hartmann, the right-hand *and* left-hand man of the project, without whom this project would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I consider myself useless in comparison. :)
- - hypnotoad a.k.a. Armin Hornung, our brilliant analyst specialized on the interfaces
- - chraneco a.k.a. Patrick Alt, who deserves special credit and respect for having built JoomGallery 1.5 practically on his own.
... but also ...
- - the translators, who do one hell of a job dealing with short term changes
- - Anke, our everpresent translations coordinator
- - Claudia E., our one-woman-support-team, who appears to have a bottomless pool of useful links at her disposal, and uses it to help solving countless issues in numerous forums.
Without this fantastic team, Joomgallery would not exist. Thank You!
Special thanks also go out to the families of the team members, who had to bear with our efforts all so often.
Finally, many thanks to all those who helped with the project, by submittting bug reports, posting inspiring feature requests and encouraging feedback, or making donations, and last but not least our web host who supplies a premium service.
Hoping that you will all have as much fun using the gallery as we had creating it.....
Sincerely Your JoomGallery::ProjectTeam
Download JoomGallery, language files and addons, etc.
Please keep in mind that JoomGallery 1.0.0 runs under Joomla 1.5.x *legacy mode* only.
NOTE:
We really enjoy working on JoomGallery (for the verymost part of the time  ), and as Open Source programmers, we're about as fundamentalist as they come. We have spent, and will continue to spend, a lot of our spare time to make PonyGallery ML and JoomGallery valuable contributions to the Joomla! community, free of charge and/or advertisements and backlinks of any kind.
On the other hand -and we truly regret having to put things this bluntly- donations to the project have been near zero (for the very most part of the time, as well  ).As the project entails expenses (server costs etc.) that need to be covered to guarantee it's long term continuity, we are currently also looking into alternative solutions, and are open for suggestions in this regard.
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