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Pixaria Roadmap Update

Now that version 2.6 is out there, I wanted to post a quick update on my development roadmap for Pixaria over the next few weeks. I'm increasingly keen to share my progress and plans for Pixaria because I know how much it helps everyone plan their website maintenance work. If there's more specific information that you would find useful, let me know...

In the short term, I plan to release a minor update (2.6.1) in the next few days which will address a few minor niggles that people have identified since the weekend's release of version 2.6 and which also tidies a few other bits up that I didn't have time to include.

The most significant change here is that the forms for the general settings, appearance and search administration control panels have been overhauled to use a new, tabbed interface which will hopefully make them easier to use.

The same tab approach has also been applied to the forms for editing individual images and batches of images. In the process of doing this work, I've also had the opportunity to fix few minor bugs and quirks in both of these forms. For example, the individual image edit form now has a facility to edit the image owner - something that was previously only present in the batch form.

I expect to release 2.6.1 before the end of this week and for those worried about template modifications which might be needed to upgrade, there will be no changes to any front end theme templates.

Looking further ahead to the next month or so, I'm planning another milestone release (version 2.7) to take advantage of some of the internal changes I made in version 2.6...

Under the hood, version 2.6 added preliminary support for using ImageMagick to resize images which will be a major improvement to anyone who has run into the problem of PHP running out of memory when resizing large image files. Obviously, your server will need ImageMagick installed to make use of this but most hosting companies provide it these days and Pixaria will be able to pick which system (GD or ImageMagick) is available.

Another interesting addition included with 2.6 is support for GPS coordinates in EXIF data. If you're using the new Flash upload tool to import images with EXIF GPS data, then this will already be being saved in your library. To take advantage of this, I intend to add support for Google maps in the front end and admin areas of Pixaria in version 2.7. It is also possible that I will be able to include the facility to search for images within a given radius of a specific location on Earth though I don't yet know how feasible this is. If you have any ideas related to this, I'd be interested to hear them.

Finally, two more features I'm looking to add to version 2.7 are support for tooltip style image previews when the mouse cursor hovers over a thumbnail and Cooliris support via MediaRSS links. The groundwork for both of these is more or less done so they should be fairly easy to add.

If anyone has any thoughts on any of these plans, I'm always happy to discuss by e-mail at info@pixaria.com.

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