JoomGallery 1.5.7

Sunday, 17 April 2011 20:00

With JoomGallery 1.5.7 the team publishes the last version with new features (versioning), running only with Joomla! 1.5.x. It can not be installed in Joomla! 1.6.

We have made over 100 changes (fixes, features, other modifications). In this article we describe only the most important one. You will find more specifics as always in file 'changelog.php' (in folder 'admin' of the zip).
From now on we will start with the developing a native version for Joomla! 1.6/1.7 and their new features (e.g. ACL). Of course we will give you further support for 1.5.7 and if necessary publish a bugfix release as soon as problems have to be fixed.

Downloads
JoomGallery 1.5.7
Language files

Before the most important changes are presented briefly here are some notes:

A backup of the file system and the database is strongly recommended before you start an installation or update.

Before starting a new installation please note our Quick-Start Guide, especially the system requirements. If these are not fulfilled an installation will be denied.
Since new language constants were introduced, an update of the language files is necessary. Also new versions of extensions are available. With activated autoupdate they are displayed in administrator panel of JoomGallery. Partly these extensions are dependent on the new JoomGallery 1.5.7, otherwise they will show an error.

The following sequence of installation or update process is therefore recommended:
1) JoomGallery 1.5.7
2) Language files
3) Extensions

If an installation by autoupdate is not possible, please load the zips from our downloads and install them within the extension manager of Joomla!

 

New features and modifications

• New feature 'hidden categories and images': Categories and images can be marked as 'hidden'. They are then no longer displayed in gallery and category view of JoomGallery.
  However, they will still be displayed if they are linked directly, e.g. by a menu item which links to a category view.
  With this feature for example separate areas can be created within the gallery.
  It's not a safety feature in order to generally protect categories and images. If this is required, the category should be set to 'not published'.
  A further possibility is to display 'hidden' images with the help of our content plugin JoomPlu and the editor button plugin JoomBu, but not within the gallery. So the Media Manager of Joomla! could be replaced by JoomGallery (at least according to images).
• Modification: The state 'published/not published' and the access level of categories affect also the respective subcategories and therein contained images now. For example, it will be no longer possible to display sub-categories and their images if the parent category does not have the state 'published'. Those of you who used this 'feature bug' in the past should use the feature 'hidden categories and images' for it now.
• General modifications to increase performance.
• New Plugin 'JoomSearchJoomFish' for the search in Joom!Fish. Thus it is possible to search also in translated contents of JoomGallery. (download).
• New Tab 'Search' in configuration manager to configure the search view.
• New options to switch on/off icons for download/favourite/report in category, detail, toplists, favourite and search view
• For images and categories any additional fields can be defined (e.g. a copyright notice separately saved and displayed from general description), but modifications at certain XML files are necessary, as well as template overrides. A tutorial will follow shortly.
• New option to suppress the output of empty categories.
• Slideshow: new options to determine the behavior after the last image.
• New option to disable the default detail view if it is not used in the gallery. So an unwanted direct call by URL is no longer possible.
• Crop of images: New option to determine the background color of the cropped images if the crop width/height settings exceeds the dimensions of the source image.
• New option to display image URLs with real paths if the dynamic cropping and the watermark are disabled.
• New option to output an RSS feed in category view.
• It's possible to activate notifications in case of downloads, uploads with JAVA in user panel and creating of nametags now.
• Sorting by published/not published images in image manager.
• User panel (image and category overview): The column 'published' was added.
• User panel: the filtering options were completed by 'published' and 'not published'.
• User panel: The tooltips in image and category overview were improved.
• User panel: Search field and category filter added.
• For pagination in all views CSS tags and classes were added.
• Ajax Pagination in MiniJoom (the popup window for selection of images).
• New option to align thumbails and texts, e.g. in category view at the lower edge of the images.

Fixes

• Using the arrow keys within opened Shadowbox (Plugin) closes the box.
• When creating a new category in user panel with activated option 'Allow users to change access level' in the configuration all access levels of Joomla! were selectable.
• URLs in comments which were inserted with BBCode tags and longer than 40 characters, were wrapped with a HTML 'br' and thereby invalid.
• In backend it was not possible to select an category thumbnail for a not published category.
• With activated dynamic crop and watermark the watermark was cut. It is now inserted after the crop.
• In favourite view images were still visible, even if they were set to 'unpublished' later on.
• Images without owner were not found in a search.
• Wrong display of Thickbox3 in IE9.
• It was not possible to edit certain categories in frontend if Joomla! SEF was activated.
• A search was unsuccessful, if the search term contained special characters e.g. umlauts.

Have fun with the new version of JoomGallery.
Please don't hesitate to ask in our forum.