ZP 1.0.3 released

Zenphoto 1.0.3 has been released. Grab it while it’s hot! This is mostly a security update, and we recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible. Release notes and downloads can be found at the zenphoto site.

Automating SSH+SVN

We current have the ZP subversion repo hosted at Berlios. Since I’ve been hacking on ZP I’ve been kind lazy, and just typed my password in everytime that I needed to do something on the repo. Well, I finally got fed up, and figured someone must have written up some note on how to get TortoiseSVN to automatically log you in. Guess what.. they have. A very useful guide, even if you know what you’re doing. The key point here is: make sure your Putty session is the same as the full host name of the svn repo.

Zenphoto 1.0.2 released

So another release of ZP goes out the door. And still no sub albums! I know… we suck. But in our defense we fixed a slew of security bugs and Tristan thinks he’s finally nailed the pathing issues. We can but hope! Anyway, grab it here, and check the changelog here.

And we have started sub albums. You can find it under the branch in SVN. It’s coming.. don’t stress it. Viewing works, but there is a shed load to clean up in the Admin interface.

ZP gets honorable mention in Web 2.0 awards

So Zenphoto got an honorable mention in the digital photography section of the Web 2.0 awards. How cool is that! Not bad for a kid still at school and a part time night hacker. Nicely validates the direction of ZP and clearly shows we’re getting something right. Dunno who nominated us, but thanks! Next year, let’s see if we can knock Flickr off the top rung

Back in the ZP saddle

Oh, it’s been way to long.. but that’s life I guess. Anyway, I’m now coming up for air after some hectic real work and am getting back in the saddle. Been having lots of fun being paid to tour through the Portal and Portlets world and hope to post some thoughts about that soon.

In the meantime, all you ZP fans will be happy. Tristan and I are aiming to get a new release out this week. The main focus has been security. We’ve had quite a few problem areas pointed out to us and we hopefully have fixed them all.

And yes.. sub albums has begun! You can find the progress in the branch in SVN. We figured security was a little more important for now. But only just

Thank god for Askimet!

Since I started posting about Zenphoto here, I guess this blog has gotten some visibility. So much so, that it now seems to be in some splogging list. I get ~15-30 splogs a day. Most annoying! Don’t those idiots have anything better to do? Well, it got really tiring having to delete all the spam, not to mention my mailbox was getting spammed with all the post notifications. Askimet to the rescue. It correctly identifies the majority of my splog and just removes it from my view. Some still get through, but it’s a lot less than before. Today, I removed 81 splogs!! Grrr.

The only stupid thing about Askimet was that I had to sign up at wordpress.com so I could active the plugin. That’s stupid! I have a blog here, why make me have a wasted blog there? Oh well.. I’m sure they’ll change that policy when they find most wordpress.com blogs are dead.

Getting my life back!

So no sooner had I got back into the country than the Olympics started. And I couldn’t stop watching them. Now they’re over, I can get my life back. And get back to working on Zenphoto et al.

zenphoto 1.0.0 beta released!

So the moment you’ve all been waiting for is here! We put out a new zenphoto release today. For the impatient, grab it here. For those who are interested, here’s the list of all the new features:

• Drag and drop sorting of the Gallery and Albums (and there was more rejoicing!)
• Album and Image deletion from the admin section (be careful!)
• Comment notification (so now you know what people are saying about you)
• Improvements to the Admin section
• And many behind the scenes architectural improvements.

You can check the full changelog here.

WARNING: Although we have made substantial progress in this release, this is still a beta.
Make sure that you take good backups of anything you can’t afford to lose when you upgrade.
Just in case..

Upgrading

First, make sure you back up your DB tables. Next, upload the new files over the top
of your existing installation. You will have to update your config.php file manually
with the new [admin_email] field and the new pathing at the bottom. Did we say back
up your DB tables? Finally, load http://hostname/zenphoto/zen/upgrade.php (or whatever
your path is) in your browser. Click on Go and watch the magic.

Known Issues

You may have to delete your admin cookie and log back into your site after the upgrade.
You may not. Let us know.

Requests

As usual, please post all issues to the Support forums. We also like to know when things
go right and how pleased people are If you are keen to keep abreast of zenphoto changes
you can do so by following the zenphoto categories at Tristan’s and my blog.

Future Directions

We do listen to what everyone is saying. Really, we do. We try. So here are a few things that we know everyone would like: WP plugin(s), RSS feeds, easier installs, etc. We’ll get there. For now, enjoy!

RSS Pulled

Bad news! We’re not going to include the RSS work I’ve been doing for zenphoto in the next release. I just didn’t think it was ready for primetime. It’s close, but the sticking point for me is that we don’t have a good value to put in the <pubDate> element for albums or images.

Sure, I can just stick in the current date, but that kinda defeats the object don’t you think? If all the RSS items just have the same date, how can you tell what’s changed? How can you do cool things like get a feed containing only the last 10 images added? Adding a “date added” field to both albums and images is a bit more than can be achieved in the next day or so (I do have a real job afterall!) so we’re pulling it for now.

Check the image to see what I mean. Pretty cool still though huh? Made possible because of Firefox, Sage and the plain_and_green_twocolumn style sheet.

I know there’s been a lot of clamouring for it in the Support Forums, so I might make it available from this site, until we’re ready to include it in a full ZP release.

RSS on the move

I dunno.. sometimes code just seems to pour out. I started working on RSS feeds for zenphoto. It’s still early days yet, but it’s coming along nicely. Check this one out for starters. Of course, I want to add more functionality for feeds of albums, images, comments, etc. But once again, the main plumbing is in place. Dunno if I’ll get it all done by our expected drop date, but I’ll sure try!!