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Template Changes in 2.7.6

I've had a few enquiries about problems related to the 2.7.6 upgrade breaking the display of thumbnails in the front end of Pixaria Gallery websites. This is not a bug in the software but is happening because the upgrade includes changes to the template files for gallery thumbnail display on the front end.

As with any Pixaria upgrade, it's important to check the changelog for details of which files which have been modified. In this case, the file index.gallery/gallery.thumbnails.tpl has changed from version 2.7.5 so if you have created a custom version of this for your own theme, you will need to update it to work with the latest release of Pixaria.

To make this easier, there is a comparison tool to visualise the differences between different versions of Pixaria templates. To see the output of the comparison tool for the file index.gallery/gallery.thumbnails.tpl click here.

Pixaria 2.7.6 Released

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of Pixaria Gallery version 2.7.6 featuring near final support for RackSpace Cloud Files storage and improved metadata importing.

If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that I didn't post a news article about version 2.7.5 and this is because it was primarily intended as a public beta release for testing new cloud storage integration.

Support for cloud storage content delivery networks (CDNs) means that for the first time Pixaria is able to store image files on a remote content delivery server as well as on your main web server which is a big advantage if you have a very large image library.

There are a number of cloud storage systems on the market at the moment of which the best known are probably Cloud Files and Amazon S3. For the moment, Pixaria only supports RackSpace Cloud Files but as soon as support for this service is out of beta testing, I will be adding support for Amazon S3 as well.

Implementing cloud storage support in Pixaria has been a major project as image display and storage is literally the core of the entire software and many, many parts of the internals have had to be modified to provide this new capability. For this reason, you may wish to wait until the 'beta' label is removed from this feature before you use it in a full production environment.

Known limitations are:

1. When deleting images stored in the cloud from the library, it is not yet possible to move them back into the incoming directory.
2. The import process is considerably slower when using the RackSpace Cloud Storage option. This is because original, thumbnail and comping image files all have to be transferred from your Pixaria server to the cloud storage system.

Aside from the new cloud storage features, Pixaria 2.7.6 also includes a number of improvements to the admin area including better metadata importing from images with XMP metadata tags, more descriptive error messages on the import and upload tools.

For full details of all the changes, see the release notes and file changelog. As always, you can get the update by dropping me an e-mail to info@pixaria.com.

New Documentation Coming Soon

As anyone who's looked at the documentation recently will know, it's a little bit out of date so I've been working on a new documentation system that will be easier to maintain and be better organised.

I'm hoping to have the work on this done in the next week or so at which point I will start transferring the content from the old system over and rewriting it to bring it up to date. Please bear with me while I do this work as it's top priority for me to make sure that the documentation is up to speed with the actual software!