Piwigo 2.4, behind the scene

Piwigo 2.4 is a major huge version. On the official release note you’ll learn how many changes are introduced. What you don’t know is who made this release possible. Let’s summarize:

• rvelices: multiple size engine, watermark, navigation links on photo, center of interest
• P@t: mobile theme
• mistic100: change username, email notification on user registration, sort user comments, new design for photos sort order, unified messages management, hotlinks compatibility
• Zaphod (new team member): new default theme Elegant
• flop25: technical documentation on multiple size, nice videos that you can see on Piwigo 2.4 release notes
• plg (that’s me): various changes in administration, configuration for multiple size and watermark, new design on albums administration
• plg and mistic100 have worked together on improvements in the Batch Manager and the new design on photo administration screen
• ddtddt: managed to add 3 new languages thanks to new translators for Esperanto, Finnish and Cambodian. Piwigo is now available in 47 languages! Many languages are now much more complete and updated with strings introduced in Piwigo 2.4. Great work from the translation team!

 

 

This version took 8 months to come instead of 6 as planned. The 2 extra months are mainly due to a lack of available time and difficulties on the migration from 2.3. As I wrote earlier, 2.4 is a huge version and the multiple size engine changes important things like the organization of photo files. Now that Piwigo 2.4 is out, we immediatly see how important the graphics library has become (any tiny issue blocks all sizes generation).

I’m confident that multiple size is a huge improvement for Piwigo and when rvelices first described me what he was working on in december 2011, I was really excited! The mobile theme is also a very important feature, a big step for Piwigo, which is now much more “mobile phone compliant”. The new default theme, Elegant, designed by Zaphod (already author of the popular theme Stripped) is also an important change, 3 years after theme Sylvia (the pink trees and black background theme). Even if it can’t be considered as new features, the improvements on user experience highly matter to make Piwigo easy to use. Better user experience will directly improve Piwigo popularity.

Enjoy Piwigo 2.4 and congratulations to all coders, translators, video creator, support and beta testers!

Piwigo release cycle

Piwigo 2.2 was planned for Fall 2010. Obviously we have been late! Even if that doesn’t really matters, I would really like to shorten the release cycle. In my opinion, having less features is not a problem at all. Piwigo 2.1 was out on May 2010 and coding for Piwigo 2.2 really started in September (we made other useful stuffs than coding for 3 months).

Here is a review of past release cycles:

• 1.4 = 16 months
• 1.5 = 8 months
• 1.6 = 8 months
• 1.7 = 10 months
• 2.0 = 21 months. Far too long (with 6 months between RC1 and final version)
• 2.1 = 14 months. Better, but still too long.
• 2.2 = 11 months. Still Better, but can be improved.

Or if you want something more “visual”, here is a line with release cycles, 1 “=” sign means 2 months:

1.3 ======== 1.4 ==== 1.5 ==== 1.6 ===== 1.7 =========== 2.0 ======= 2.1 ===== 2.2

Why is a long release cycle a problem? Because it encourages the coding team to add many new features at the very last moment (even after RC1) and to add nothing new right after the major release is available. If you have a short release cycle, there is no problem to say:

ok, let’s postpone this feature, I’ll add it for next major release

With a long release cycle, this would be:

oh no, if I don’t add this feature right now, I’ll have to wait another 10 months before it’s available in a stable release! let’s try to add it now and postpone the release date

The consequence is a release cycle becoming longer and longer.

A good compromise is a 6 month release cycle. There is no real problem as soon as we’re not forced to add a fixed list of features. Instead of a list of features, we set the release date, and we’ll have the stable features available that day (after a 1 month release candidate period RC1, RC2, RC3…). Piwigo 2.3 will probably have less new features than 2.1 or 2.2 but it doesn’t matters at all.

Piwigo 2.3 planning on Piwigo.org forum

Piwigo 2.2, the makers

Read the full release notes on Piwigo.org.

I have worked on the user upload, on ImageMagick and high definition resizing options, on multisite, and on the new Batch Manager. P@t has worked on themes and languages updating system, on new versions of jQuery, GIF support on upload and has removed the Adviser Mode . rvelices has worked on automatic merge of CSS and Javascript files, on CSS sprites for icons, on renaming “category” into “album”.

ddtddt has managed the translation effort and the result is 14 new languages: Catalan by josep.torne, Íslenska (Icelandic) by Jimmy Wallster, Québecois (Quebecois) by TiOger, Latviešu (Latvian) by Aivars Baldone, Norske (Norwegian) by atlew, Slovenšcina (Slovenian) by Klemen, Slovensky (Slovak) by dodo, Svenska (Swedish) by Jonas and Jimmy Wallster, Српски (Serbian) by Ћирилица1, Українська (Ukrainian) by quest_tom, עברית (Hebrew) by Adirbiton, فارسی (Farsi) by mohammadN, ქართული (Georgian) by geomagi, 中文 (繁體) (Traditional Chinese) by chouyh. You can find a list of the other translators on my blog post about release 2.1.

Piwigo gets a new logo designed by Jimmy Wallster (who made a great customization of Piwigo on Iceland My Way and who also translated Piwigo into Icelandic and helped on Swedish). I will soon post the history of Piwigo logos on this blog.

New logo for the Piwigo project

Thank you to everybody involved in Piwigo 2.2 creation!