Gallery 2.0 Released

uss_valiant writes "From the Gallery website: "We are incredibly pleased to announce the release of Gallery 2.0! Over three years of design and development have gone into creating the best online photo management product possible. Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1, and we hope that you like what you see. Don't wait, download Gallery 2 now!" From a developers point of view, the Gallery 2 framework is particularly interesting because it's written with modern programming patterns (OOP, extreme programming, test driven development, MVC, factories, modularity, ...) in mind which is rather unusual for PHP based projects. Over 1500 unit tests ensure correct functionality and its architecture is really impressive."

FYI

[by Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_Project [wikipedia.org]

The Gallery Project is an open source PHP project enabling simple management and publication of photographs and other digital media through a PHP-enabled Apache or IIS web server. Photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and flipping, among other things. Albums can be organized hierarchically and individually controlled by administrators or privileged users.

+5 Insightful!

[h0bbel (105687)]

RC1 was codenamed +5 Insightful, how nice :)

Re:+5 Insightful!

[Q2Serpent (216415)]

Haha, have "+5 insightful" twice in a post and get modded insightful!

Mods: The parent post was *informative*. See how it works? Not insightful, but informative.

Gallery

[Saiyaman (859809)]

I have been using the Beta of 2 for Gallery for a while. I love it. It is great if you want to share photos with friends after a fun night partying. Also allows your friends to upload pictures if they are so inclined.

Re:Gallery

[Scooter (8281)]

I agree - I had used Gallery 1.3.x for years and it was "OK", but was a pain to permission up, and stored all the images below the doc-root, so it was trivial to bypass the security anyway.

All of this has now been fixed, with a robust user/group model with a permission "tree" ("view all sizes" implies "view full size" and "view thumbnail" for example), and the images stored in a dedicated data directory outside of the web server doc-root. They've also fixed that annoying "feature" of 1.x.x where it would output image URLs with the explicit host name used during the install. This meant for my old gallery, that all the image URLs were prefixed with my internal host name for the server, so you got no images when browsing it from outside (unless you had a real non-proxied connection to the Intarweb and could edit the local hosts file :P ) It no longer gets it's knickers in a twist and corrupts it's own config file either (although I suspect this only happened on certain combinations of PHP and Apache)

Gallery 2 demonstrates the ease of use of a mature project. Upgrading within 1.x.x release used to be a bit of a chore, but after unpacking Gallery 2 to a new virtual server, a couple of MySQL commands to create and permissiona new database, all I had to do was browse to the new server, and tell it where the data was for the old gallery and it just got on with it. Detected all the image tools and preserved all the comments and metadata.

The "help n fill" on the local server paths is a bit spooky, but handy. The upload options are comprehensive, even supporting Xo's "publish to Internet" function, although I can't really reccomend that - it's very slow. The best option is to use Gallery Remote - a swing app that lets you just drag images, or folders or zip files of images onto it to upload to your gallery.

It even acts as a shop, letting your customers select images to buy from smaller versions and then making them a handy zip archive for checkout time.

Now I don't have to bother emailing pictures to family and friends - I just made them a user id each, created some groups, permissioned up the albums (and it supports inheritence too for permissions) and mailed people the link :)

Fantastic job guys.

Any other ways to see it

[staticdragon (95211)]

Anyone have an alternate link or a server thats running it since the site is borked?

Gallery vs. JAlbum vs. ???

[banglogic (702448)]

I have been using JAlbum [jalbum.net] for my photo album projects for quite some time now. I like it pretty well and there are a lot of templates out there for it. I'm not crazy about it though. I checked earlier versions of Gallery a while back but I didn't care for the look of the UI and the webpages it created. Anybody try this new version of Gallery yet? Any other free web albums you guys would recommend?

Re:Gallery vs. JAlbum vs. ???

[Titanium Angel (557780)]

Since the functionality is completely separated from display, you can use its easy to customize templating system to completely adapt its look to your needs. I've been using it for a few months, and I must say I'm impressed. Seems to be the best photo gallery in town :)

Re:Gallery vs. JAlbum vs. ???

[Arathrael (742381)]

I spent a while looking at various photo galleries a while ago and couldn't find a single one I was happy with.

The main problem is that I'd like to have one photo in multiple albums. I know that was on the requested features for Gallery - anyone know if it made it into this release? (I can't check with the website not responding).

I'd also like one that doesn't arbitrarily use the terms 'album', 'collection', 'category', etc., in strange and bizarre ways. They're the same bloody thing! (in that they're all u

PHP != Crap Code

[ilkahn (6642)]

I have often remarked that a "Writing Maintainable Enterprise Class Systems in PHP" book would be the best thing since sliced bread for the PHP community. There is nothing so wrong with the language and the environment (although some have likened it to training wheels without the bycicle) that can't be remedied with discipline, communication, and the use of mindful quality software development discipline.

PHP has been a wonderful language in which to "put together quick solutions which grow into large projects" for me in fields from accounting to my current work in Industrial / Manufacturing! The interfaces you can write to control PLCs and generate plant floor intelligence using *good* PHP and a web server are light years beyond what is usually available on a shop floor with PanelViews and Vorne displays (Light bars...) Someone out there would be smart to write a PHP-for-software-engineering book.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[man_of_mr_e (217855)]

The problem is, when those small projects become big projects, they usually need to be completely rewritten from scratch because the small projects were not written with maintainability in mind.

This is the primary problem with languages like PHP. There is *NO* structure to them, no type strictness, no standard practices. ASP (original) suffered from the same problems.

JSP and ASP.NET have a lot better structure to them, and standard practices, not to mention tools that follow them.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[B3ryllium (571199)]

I've found that the lack of structure to some PHP programs can be beneficial; you can write a one-off program, then refine it piece by piece into usable code. But, that said, I have some system design experience in C++ and Java, so I tend to structure my code a lot more logically than some people.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[ilkahn (6642)]

I guess that's sort of the point I wanted to make, is that with some foresight and proper discipline, those small projects, when they become big projects, don't need to be rewritten from scratch, if maintainability was in mind from day one. Take PEAR::DB or one of the more advanced O/R mapping PHP frameworks (such as Propel), throw a decent templating system on there (such as Smarty), keep your code highly cohesive and loosely coupled, and the benefits of the language and the libraries are *massive*.

I spent 4-5 years trying to get JSP to work as a "rapid development prototype to full scale application" environment, and I constantly ran into issues with Tomcat, Jasper, JAR file surprises, all of the warts that come with the Java language, etc... I switched to PHP for all "non-transactional" code when I did a study whereby I analyzed the amount of time it took one of my teams to react to "changing customer requirements" utilizing PHP/Apache as opposed to how much time it took another team of mine to react to similar requirement changes using JSP/Tomcat. I am not saying that JSP couldn't have worked, it's just that it seemed to not really have as many benefits as I would have liked for an environment that required as much agility as that which I found myself in.

I have to admit, my experience with ASP is nearly nill, as I have not been able to convince any clients to allow me to test out MS platforms controlling plant floor hardware.

All that being said, when my company writes something that requires "transactional integrity", we do pick Java for the backend... it's just that those situations in my field really are few and far between.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[NickV (30252)]

You're comparing a decent templating engine (Smarty) with crap Java technology (JSPs.) Most modern Java programmers disdain JSPs and use other, better templating technologies. Try using Velocity [apache.org] . Requires no recompiling when you make changes and is a very very easy templating language that provides an amazing amount of power (you literally can drop items into a hashtable of VelocityContexts and then access them by using "$" notation... such as "$user.name") If you want something that will really rock your world, check out JSF [jcp.org] or Tapestry [apache.org] (it turns web programming into writing an event-driven application, like desktop apps.)

The problem with most PHP applications is that they don't scale. I don't mean that in a "PHP SUXORS! YOU CAN'T WRITE S$!@ IN IT"... I mean that most PHP applications aren't built with any real caching implementations (like this gallery software, or phpbb, or nuke, etc...) and the PHP frameworks that I looked at don't really provide that functionality.

The stuff availble for Java is just so much more powerful. You have the Hibernate [hibernate.org] OR mapping package that provides an amazing amount of OR work for you, including the ability to plug in multiple transactional caches, session caches, database connection pools (including the ability to have clustered caches across multiple boxes.) You have complex messaging architectures to talk to and keep multiple machines in sync. You have great web service APIs and great search engines that can be plugged in. Stuff to that degree just doesn't exist for PHP.

It often shocks me to see so many "Enterprise Level" PHP apps released with no caching implementation... you shouldn't see ANY home page hit a database on every hit. (And yes, you can easily avoid stale content by eviction, injection routines.)

So yes, you can definitely write decent stuff in PHP. But for the highly scalable enterprise environment, the libraries and packages that exist for Java and ASP just don't exist.

The other thing I hate about PHP is that there just is no IDE that is of the caliber of Eclipse for PHP (and PHPEclipse just ain't there yet.) A professional IDE allows me to introspect objects, trace stacks, change variables on the fly per hit and control each thread individually. This kind of power makes debugging and performance testing so much easier and more powerful than a PHP app. Good luck trying to seriously profile a PHP app...

So yea, PHP has it's place. It's wonderful for quick one-offs. I just wouldn't want to code a massive user load, transactional, high availability, multiple machine cluster application on it.

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[ilkahn (6642)]

I actually agree completely regarding caching... The proliferation of "databases that seem quick enough" has led to an entire generation of programmers that think that it's perfectly reasonable to do a handful of database queries per page load.

However, in my particular case, I have different needs. My company writes "shop floor intelligence" systems in which PHP is my *middleware* language. We use Smarty/PHP to generate XML/[other streams] from proprietary interfaces to PLCs or embedded shop floor systems

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[ngunton (460215)]

I agree, the issue of what to set for the expiration times is critical. I use a combination of approaches: Short expiration times (1 minute) for "what's new" type pages, which ensures that people will never see very old content (one minute is fast enough for anything but real real-time data such as stock quotes, but that's probably a case where you'd be setting 'no-cache' anyway)... this also means that the backend is being called at most once a minute for these pages, which isn't going to be a problem for

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[NickV (30252)]

Those are some really interesting and cool solutions to the problems high load presents on a LAMP site. I'm sure lots of those flags and parameters you added came from experimentation and testing (noticing things like IE doesn't really notice pages with different cookies but similar content are new, etc).

I did mention earlier that it is possible to code a scalable perl/php/mysql/etc application (look at /. itself.) It's just that you have to jump through lots of hoops and write alot of non-business-logic

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[ngunton (460215)]

You're right, I did have to code the URL generation routine myself... but the code itself is really trivial (the hard part was thinking of the right way to do it), and yes, it is very portable to other contexts. I also think that the arguments for Java solutions can be applied equally to LAMP, particularly Perl, largely because of the existence of CPAN. I can code up some very powerful stuff very rapidly because just about anything you might need to do is probably already up on CPAN as a module. However tha

Re:PHP != Crap Code

[man_of_mr_e (217855)]

While I agree with you that you CAN create good and maintainable and scalable code in PHP (as well as just about any language), the question is, does the language, common toolsets, and best practices promote good use of the language. Also, does the language allow simple and easily caught mistakes?

The lack of any real type safety in PHP makes it difficult to track down simple typos (for example, misspelling a variable name). I don't mean syntax errors, since those are easily caught, but typo's that are not

Marketing

[gunpowda (825571)]

Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1...

Of course, it were a Microsoft product, the natural successor would be 'Gallery Super Uber Ultimate Edition'.

Re:Marketing

[mblase (200735)]

Of course, it were a Microsoft product, the natural successor would be 'Gallery Super Uber Ultimate Edition'.

You sure you're not thinking of the "Street Fighter" series?

buzzwords check passed

[tonigonenstein (912347)]

OOP, extreme programming, test driven development, MVC, factories, modularity

Slashdotted

[xot (663131)]

here is the google cache link :
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:EYRwD7JSrCoJ:ga llery.menalto.com/+&hl=en [66.102.7.104]

How are the Debian packages?

[swillden (191260)]

Hey, has anyone tried out the Debian gallery2 package? Does it do a good job of migrating the data, or does it install stand-beside? I have a gallery 1 installation that my whole family uses, and I'd like to know if it's safe to upgrade, or if I should wait for the bugs to be worked out.

Re:How are the Debian packages?

[BacOs (33082)]

I'm the Debian package maintainer for both gallery1 and gallery2. The gallery2 package is completely separate from the gallery1 package - you can install/use both simultaneously if you wish. Using the gallery2 migration module, you can migrate from Gallery 1 to Gallery2.

FWIW, I uploaded version 2.0-1 of the Debian gallery2 package this afternoon - it should be available in Debian unstable as of this afternoon's archive run.

Unit Test 1501

[TimCrider (215456)]

Slashdot Effect [ FAILED ]

Can it manage photos of your server on fire?

[joelparker (586428)]

Anyone have a cache or alternate download page?

Working download link

[Karamchand (607798)]

Since the gallery.menalto-site seems to be slashdotted already here's a working download link at least, directly from sourceforge.net: gallery 2.0 file list [sourceforge.net]

top three favorite features

[jackstack (618328)]

1. Upload a huge honking zip file of compressed images and create an album
2. Integrated "Publish to Your-Special-Gallery" from WindowsXP "My Pictures" folder
3. Easy to customize permissions

This (along with gnump3d) are my two FAVORITE web apps for linux.

Give me a break.

[saberworks (267163)]

If this is an example of good PHP coding someone please shoot me. They use their own internal "require_once" instead of simply using ini_set to set the include directories correctly. They name all their included files *.inc and *.class which can be a severe security issue if these files are available from the web root (which by default they are).

From the code I saw, everything is extremely over-engineered (read: too freaking complicated). It looks like they have some input sanitization functions but they aren't used consistently.

The coding style throughout isn't consistent (but who cares?).

On the plus side, they have used PHPDOC or some similar syntax to document their classes and functions (makes for good API docs). They have used external libraries for some things like templating and database abstraction (can't say much for their choices but at least they didn't rewrite those from scratch).

The error handling also looks particularly nightmarish:

if ($ret->isError()) {
return array($ret->wrap(__FILE__, __LINE__), null);
}

(repeated 12 times in one 100 line file!!!!)

Re:Give me a break.

[Warren_Canuck (522319)]

About the internal "require_once", maybe you should read the comments on it then you would see that G2 keeping track of what files it has already included and only using PHP's (very slow) require_once speeds up the function by about 10x (line 2480, modules/core/classes/GaleeryCoreApi.class)

As for the coding style not being constistent, could you please give an example? G2 has very strict code style guidelines that have to be followed for a patch to be accepted (you can find them on the g2 codex site which is currently getting hammered). The code may appear complicated but if you take the time to read things it's actually quite legible and it makes sense. Usually people who have not worked on very large team projects feel intimidated by something as large and complex as Gallery2, I know I was when I first started working on it.

I admit the .inc and .class issue appears to be somewhat concerning, nothing that can't be fixed by 2 lines in a .htaccess file though. I'll be sure to bring it up at the next meeting.

The error handling code works and I challenge you to find a cleaner way to let the developer know exactly where an error occured so they can fix it. Why does it occur so often? Because error checking is good, it's just too bad more people don't do it.

Re:Give me a break.

[Fweeky (41046)]

"The error handling code works and I challenge you to find a cleaner way to let the developer know exactly where an error occured so they can fix it."

I'll take "exceptions" for £50, Bob. Unfortunate that PHP5 doesn't seem to be taking off quite like PHP4 did; I wonder if that's because many of the people who would find the new new features attractive are finding other languages suit them better? I know I did, and I used to really love PHP and was dead excited by Zend Engine 2 :/

Wordpress support

[Coppit (2441)]

To easily include gallery pictures in your blogs, check out the wpg2 [ozgreg.com] plugin.

Second to one

[fulldecent (598482)]

Camera Life is so much better: http://fdcl.sf.net [sf.net]

mysql_connect()

[rsd (194962)]

whats the point of

the Gallery 2 framework is particularly interesting because it's written with modern programming patterns (OOP, extreme programming, test driven development, MVC, factories, modularity, ...)

If they still have not got the basics:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/data base.mysql.inc on line 31 Too many connections

Every PHP+MySQL HowTo^H^H^H^H^Htutorial explains that mysql_pconnect() should be used.

Re:mysql_connect()

[CProgrammer98 (240351)]

A comment from the mysql_pconnect man page (NOT written by me though):

Normally you do NOT want to use mysql_pconnect. This function is designed for environments which have a high overhead to connecting to the database. In a typical MySQL / Apache / PHP environment, Apache will create many child processes which lie in idle waiting for a web request to be assigned to them. Each of these child processes will open and hold its own MySQL connection. So if you have a MySQL server which has a limit of 50 conne

Re:paid press release on /.?

[pete6677 (681676)]

A paid press release for free software? What the hell would they have to gain from that?

Extreme Programming at Wikipedia

[jfroot (455025)]

Wikipedia explains what Extreme Programming is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming [wikipedia.org]

Re:Extreme Programming at Wikipedia

[rolfwind (528248)]

I brushed against Xtreme programming a couple of years ago - what's the difference between that and bottom-up design, with more customer feedback?

(BTW, I'm asking because I tend to be wary of the latest buzzwords in the industry, because they obscure the legitimate breakthroughs.)

Re:uhh ohh

[msaver (907214)]

Yeah -- but it uses OOP! *cutting edge technology* It sound awesome... orienting objects and whatnot.

But my favorite part is the bit about "test driven development." Of course it's test-driven... that's how programming generally works.

And Zonk... please tell me what the program is before telling me to "Clickey here! Download Now!". I'm not really looking for online photo management software at the moment, thank you.

Nope, Not offtopic!! Re:What the fuck is Gallery

[redwoodtree (136298)]

This is not offtopic at all. I'm sitting here trying to get to the site, it's /.'ed and though I was able to get it to load without the images, all it talked about was the different versions and its development.

Doing a quick google search for gallery 1.0 or 2.0 leads to nothing immediately informative.

So, what the fuck is gallery!?

Re:Nope, Not offtopic!! Re:What the fuck is Galler

[Ford Prefect (8777)]

Try the second sentence of the article summary?

Re:Uhm, been running on my server for months....

[yelvington (8169)]

Gallery2 is free software developed with the "release early, release often" philosophy, so of course it's been available for some time. But it's also been a moving target in terms of filesystem layout and API. Emerging from beta is NOT a small deal. It means that developers of add-ons can proceed with some confidence that the entire system won't turn to smoke with the next dot release.

I've been using it in a high-volume production environment since April Fool's Day. We plan on dumping it next week and moving to our own code. It's a very nice system (and a tremendous leap forward from Gallery 1), but it's wedded to a folder organizational metaphor, and we need a richer taxonomy to support potentially tens of thousands of users.

Re:Big deal.

[g0sub (582599)]

No no no - the _other_ foot. You were supposed to get up on the _other_ foot.

I've just finished creating the worlds first working fusion reactor, but hey, whats the fuzz - others have thought of it before me.

Re:Big deal.

[DataPath (1111)]

unit tests don't just show that your program works, they show that your program STILL works (make great regression tests)

Not from my experience

[lullabud (679893)]

I've been using G2 since beta 2. There were 4 beta's and an RC, iirc. I've never seen anything like spam redirections, but then, I wasn't accessing it from Windows... =P G2 is great.

Re:Not from my experience

[uss_valiant (760602)]

G2 has nothing like spam redirects or such things built-in. Search the source...
Users who have reported "weird" redirects (you may be the third), always had a misconfigured webserver, which made their Firefox use the built-in (FF) google "I feel lucky" feature. So if you give your webserver a weird name and misconfigure the webserver, you end up on a I feel lucky hit from google for that search term.

Re:My Gallery

[by Anonymous Coward]

I found your "secret" folder by the way. You might want to put a password on those pictures of your tiny cock.

Re:Extreme programming?

[manual_overide (134872)]

Extreme programming is iterative and agile. There is nothing about speed. In fact, many of the XP and UP texts i've read advocate DAYS spent in design meetings. Unless every software project is released by large mega-corps, developers just don't have that kind of time.

It's quite likely that following the UP exactly may slow down development significantly.

Re:Gallery Remote Not Wprking

[uss_valiant (760602)]

Does Gallery Remote work at all with g2?

Yes it does of course. Please post your settings in the G2 support forum (once the /.ing is over :/).