NextGEN Gallery V1.00 – A revolutionary gallery system

Today is a great day ! It’s the release of NextGEN Gallery v1.00, a breakthrough gallery system for WordPress 2.7, with a revolutionary UI …(Ups, take the keynote from Steve Jobs). Ok, let’s get serious :

I’m working on this release the last half year, from the very first version ( Published at 09.march 2007 ) till today I learned a lot about PHP, WordPress and plugin coding. The code of this plugin evolved not in all direction straight forward, so it was time to rework parts without including more and more features. It’s a hard way to program a gallery system, which should not end up as Gallery2/Coppermine clone, but contain all needed features for the requirements of 10.000 users.

This new version is for myself a milestone, the code is now much more flexible and a good start for future enhancements. Here is a small summary about the changes :

• It import all tags into the WordPress core taxonomy system, so it drop two database tables
• Added a flexible template engine, so that you can restyle the output for your needs
• Support of ImageMagick , thanks to the work of Frederic de Ranter
• Core support of MediaRSS and Cooliris/PicLens, thanks to the work of Vincent Prat
• Move / Copy images between galleries
• Show Exif / Meta information inside the imagebrowser or single picture

A look into the future :
WordPress increases with every major release the amount of functions, also the core gallery systems is now much more flexible and I’m sure that it will be still be extended in the future. I think I should start a nice transition into the core gallery so that you can switch of the plugin if you didn’t need it longer for your purpose. For example : Some users requested a comment feature on every image, this is already a feature of the core gallery system, so I didn’t need to reprogram this part. NextGEN Gallery offers a folder and gallery based structure, the WordPress Gallery is a post/page based gallery structure, but it’s possible to sync both structures with a index key.

I’m open for all your ideas and recommendation, thanks to all the testers, translators and users which support me during the last two years.

Get the new version here :

Download NextGEN Gallery Version 1.0.0
Release version @ WordPress.org

Final Release Candidate 2

So , WordPress 2.7 RC1 is now available, I suggest to update to this version and play around with the new layout. Thanks to the release delay and your feedback I catch some additional bugs (Piclens, SinglePic scaling). This will be the last release candidate until I upload the version to wordpress.org. Please note that I removed Thickbox now from core, and switched over to Shutter Reloaded, a more lightweight effect. Due to the fact that Thickbox is part of WordPress you can still stay at this effect, only some minor changes from myside are not longer available (Fullsize link).

wordTube 2.1 for WordPress 2.7

I take some time to prepare as well wordTube for WordPress 2.7. No big changes , only some admin UI updates and I added the statistic feature again (THX to Frederic de Ranter).

Here is the version until WordPress 2.7 will be released :

Download wordTube 2.1.0 RC2
Beta Version @ Google Code

NextGEN Gallery v1.0.0 Beta 3

Here is a new beta version, it should fix a couple of bug’s. Thanks already for the feedback, I’m still waiting for the release of WordPress 2.7, so it’s time for you to help a bit with testing and bug hunting.

NextGEN Gallery v1.0.0 Beta 2

Thanks for your feedback, I updated and fixes the latest known issues. There are still some open problems, would be good if you help to the this plugin. I updated now my live blogs to Version 1.00 without problems, I will still work now on style changes for the WordPress 2.7 Admin UI and wait for the final release..

NextGEN Gallery v1.0.0 Beta 1 – Time to test

So let’s roll the ball. Here is now NextGEN Gallery V1.0.0 for WordPress 2.7-Beta 1. I would be very happy if some of you give me some feedback about it, it will speed up the stability. If you test this at your blog, please backup, backup, backup the database before… the tags will be merged with the WP tags and not longer available when you downgrade to a older version.

Some note about the new features : I will release in the next days more details about the most important addons, read the changelog in the meantime. Please be so kind and report new errors at my google code project, it would help me to track the failures in the test period.

One final note : The new ImageMagick isn’t very good tested, my hoster didn’t allow exec() and the local test system doesn’t gives the same result.