Gallery 5.0 Goals

Development of Gallery 5.0 is well underway, and while we are not quite ready to reveal the product just yet, we wanted to give our clients an outline of what they can expect to see when the new version becomes available.  Gallery 5.0 will build upon changes in the 4.x series, while restoring some of the functionality of the 3.x series, delivering a product you can easily understand and navigate that is both modern and fun to use.  The next version of Gallery will not see many new features - instead, we are focusing on the existing functionality to ensure the released product is flexible, intuitive and dependable.


Goals

While our goals for Gallery 5 are simple and focused, don't let this fool you.  A lot of changes are being implemented to accomplish these goals, and you will notice many small changes that add up to big differences in how the product is used.

We can outline our high level goals as follows:

• Redesign the navigation, structure and hierarchy Gallery makes use of.
  Terminology notwithstanding, many users find navigating the current release of Gallery to be confusing, and do not understand the relationship between "global" albums and "member" albums.  Many changes in the previous iteration of Gallery were made to ensure the software could scale effectively.  We have taken many of the concepts of Gallery 4 and merged them with concepts in Gallery 3 to present an interface we think is easy to understand and navigate, and allows the administrator to control the setup of their Gallery.
• Give administrators more control over their Gallery.
  We have implemented or reinstated many software options that allow administrators to better control what members can do and where.  Administrators will now be able to define what types of albums members can create, whether they can delete those albums or not, which album options members can customize, and much more.
• SEO and efficiency improvements.
  In virtually every release, we review the search engine optimization and code-level optimization of the software, and this release is no different.
• Interface updates.
  Much of the interface has undergone a complete overhaul as a part of the navigational restructuring of the software.  In addition, some new functionality has been added to make navigating through images quicker and easier, and minor feature improvements or additions will be noticed.

By keeping our goals list short and focused, we can put more emphasis on the high-level things that matter most to our clients.


More Information

More information about each of the goals outlined above and changes made to the software to implement these goals will be forthcoming in future blog entries.  The software is still very much under heavy development and we are not ready to show off everything just yet.  Nevertheless, we wanted to highlight the higher level goals you can look to in the next release, and give everyone a small update on development.


A Teaser

For now, we will leave you with a teaser - the new index page.



Here you can see the top of the index page.  In the right hand sidebar we have a block identifying the latest comments and a block identifying the most popular tags used in Gallery.  The top of the content area is filled with a featured images slider (if you have any featured images - if you do not feature any, this block disappears, as expected).  You can feature as many images as you like, and up to 20 will be displayed in a javascript slider.  The slider will display the image (with some details along the bottom of the image), and will automatically show the next image after a couple seconds, cycling through them (and restarting when the last featured image is displayed).

You will also note that the upload button is available.  In fact, it is available on every page throughout Gallery, if you have permission to upload images somewhere.




Further down the index page, you will see the category listing.  Global albums have become categories in Gallery 5.0.  More information will be available on this in a future blog entry.  For now, just know that categories are administrator-defined containers that can be set up to

• Allow direct image uploads
  
• Allow albums to be created in them
  
• Allow neither (useful if you create subcategories and don't wish for images to be accepted within the category itself, but rather in a subcategory)

Categories allow you to specify cover images, and allow you much of the same control you had with global albums in Gallery 4.  You can think of categories in Gallery 5 as global albums, renamed, in part to help alleviate confusion and to clarify the relationship between the two different types of containers Gallery allows.

You can see from this screenshot that the hierarchy and navigation of Gallery right from the index page has been restored to a more traditional container listing.




Finally, at the bottom of the page you will see the 20 most recent images that you have permission to see, in the same slider that was used to display the featured images at the top of the screen.  You can see the hint of arrows on either side of the image, allowing you to manually navigate to the next or previous image in the slider (although, as with the featured images, it automatically cycles through each image).