Piwigo release 2.0.3

A new stable release is available, download details about Piwigo 2.0.3. What’s new in Piwigo 2.0.3 compared to 2.0.2?

Translations

ddtddt has integrated Danish translation made by nile.

ddtddt has also integrated Czech translation made by Pavel Budka (Pavel also contributed the theme switch plugin).

Chinese help pages were added thanks to winson.

Features

VDigital has strongly improved the look & feel of the Language Switch box. Instead of:

Now we have this:

I realy appreciate the new graphical design of this language switch box!

Now that I have implemented a subscription mecanism on piwigo.org, I have implemented a link inside Piwigo itself to subscribe to piwigo.org announcement newsletter. The “subscription direct link” is available at the end of the installation and in the main page of the administration.

Bugs

A security bug was fixed concerning an SQL injection issue. I don’t want to give more details right now. It is a low risk issue but VDigital has fixed it anyway.

An error was detected on Piwigo side but not correctly sent and displayed on pLoader. When a transfer fails Piwigo knows it and should tell pLoader. Now you will get the error message displayed on pLoader side.

Piwigo.com beta is online

Piwigo.com goes live. Piwigo.com is a dedicated hosting solution for Piwigo photo gallery. Sign up and get a fresh installation. You don’t have to care about low level administration tasks like installation, backup or upgrade.

Piwigo.com is another step for the Piwigo project. In the previous months, we have introduced features to simplify installation and use. NetInstall makes installation much easier. pLoader makes photo preparation and transfer much easier. Piwigo.com goes beyond. The idea is to reduce the skill set to run Piwigo.

As a hosting solution, we want Piwigo.com to become profitable. During the beta stage, accounts will be free to thank users for their early days feedback. Once the beta stage is over (3 to 6 months), only the trial period will be free. Of course, you won’t see any advertisement on your Piwigo.com gallery. Due to the basics of Piwigo, that is to say an opensource community driven project, we will offer free accounts for contributors (plugins coders, theme designers, support, and so on).

Today is the beginning of the beta stage. Piwigo.com website is currently just a signup form. During this stage, we will build the introduction website and make the whole thing work like a charm. Don’t hesitate to signup and help us to make Piwigo.com as great as possible!

Signup for a free account

Piwigo project is self hosted

In the early days of Piwigo project (2002) Piwigo project was already self hosted. I mean that the presentation pages and the forum were in a sub directory of my personnal website. In 2004, a part of the project moved to Gna! to host the CVS repository, newsletters and download mirror while presentation pages, forum and bugtracker were moved on a dedicated hosting with a dedicated domain name.
Today is another step. We’ve left Gna. As described in a forum topic, I explain that partially hosting the project on Gna forbid us to add some features.

Everything is on the piwigo.org server from now. I mean the download area, the Subversion repository, the newsletters.

1. Downloads

Because it can be be very useful to know (and communicate about) the number of downloads, I have coded a download counter system. The purpose is not to concentrate all Piwigo downloads from piwigo.org, but to get an idea of the download activity. For example, it is very useful to know that adding a news on Freshmeat increases the downloads during 2 or 3 days.

2. Subversion repository

Hosting the Subversion repository has brought simplicity, reliability and more features.

The new repository is simpler because it is http://piwigo.org/svn instead of svn+ssh://plg@svn.gna.org/svn/phpwebgallery. The URL is simpler, and the protocol is different. Apache manages permissions instead of SSH. And this is were simplicity is (on user side and admin side).

More reliable because I can manage backups by myself. As a professionnal Subversion administrator, I have written an incremental backup system for Subversion repositories (the script was improved, I will describe improvements in a future post). So, I have automatic incremental backups every 15 minutes and the backup directory is synchronized (rsync) on another server once a day. On Gna, the automatic full dump was 6 months old.

Apache permissions + self management = write access on specific folders. Here comes the first new feature. Extension contributors can host their code on Piwigo Subversion repository. For each extension directory, I can set a list of subversion accounts with write permission. This feature should make even more obvious that Piwigo project is very active, because extensions are a key feature for Piwigo project. Second new feature is Trac. I’ve installed Trac on piwigo.org, and it’s a much better source code browser than what Gna was offering.

3. Newsletters

On Gna, I had created a mailing-list for announcements. Replies were not possible (so it was not really a mailing-list). I’ve coded a simple subscription system, and now I see much more subscriptions coming The advantage of the new subscription system is that we control the way to use it (this was much more complex with mailman on Gna). Now Piwigo followers can subscribe to the newsletter from a form on the download page, from their profile in the forum, during their registration on the forum. In future Piwigo 2.0.3, users will be able to subscribe from Piwigo installation and Piwigo administration.

On one hand I’ve been happy to use Gna for hosting. It’s a perfect solution when you want to focus on the code itself and not on the tools to manage the project. I keep using Gna for another project. On the other hand, I’m very happy to have left Gna concerning Piwigo project. We now have a much better Subversion repository and the newsletter subscriptions are by far more active.

What is this blog about?

Hello readers to this new blog!

This blog is about Piwigo. Piwigo is a photo gallery for the web. Free and opensource. A few figures (everybody likes figures, no?). I created Piwigo in 2002. We are currently 15 core team members. 10,000 downloads a month for core product. 240 extensions. 15,000 downloads a month for extensions. 5,000 forum members have written 100,000 posts in 5 forums (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish). 3,400 commits in Subversion repository. 14 languages supported.

Stronger than figures, Piwigo has a community. We are passionate coders, pro or amateur photographers. Piwigo is “community driven”, ie new features are discussed in public and with transparency. Users take part in the development stages with their tests, feedback and ideas.

In this blog I will write about the project. The way I live it as founder.

Welcome to this blog and happy reading!