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Pixaria Roadmap Update

It's been a little while since my last update on the status of Pixaria Gallery so I thought that it was about time I talked briefly about some of the developments coming in the near future.

My roadmap for Pixaria releases this year has been defined by the short term goal of improving the e-commerce capabilities of the software, specifically adding coupons and discount codes and the ability to sell different types of products such as workshops, CD/DVD products and other non image related products. Once this is complete, the plan is then to follow this up with a complete overhaul of the front end user interface later in the year with the goal of making the design cleaner and easier to customise.

Alongside these big projects, I've also been working hard to fine tune the performance of the new importing tools in the Pixaria back end and to get the documentation fully up to date on its new content management system - something that's now finally complete.

Current status

With development on the big new features well under way, I wanted to share some details of how the addition of expanded product features will affect Pixaria Gallery's front end.

Where possible, I've tried to limit the amount of changes I make to the front end in recent updates because I know that it can be a nuisance to update customised templates. With the addition of coupon and product features however, I will have to make some significant changes to the front end to add product pages and to alter the shopping cart to handle coupons.

Because of this, I've decided that rather than re-use the current user interface elements and styles from Pixaria 2, now would be a good time to begin using the style sheet and layout elements that are planned for inclusion in Pixaria Gallery version 3.0. The advantage of this is that it will allow for some stress testing and feedback on the proposed changes and of course, less work will be required to upgrade to version 3.0.

The updated HTML and CSS components will make their debut in Pixaria Gallery version 2.8.1 and will include new templates for a user's account homepage, postcards, the news blog and completed purchases pages. The look and feel isn't massively different from the current default theme style in Pixaria but the HTML and CSS code is much more compact (with no tables) which will result in better page load times, simpler customisation, easier theming and most importantly, the possibility of colour scheme editing from the Appearance Settings control panel further down the line.

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on these proposed changes and particularly how people feel about the plan to introduce the new CSS and HTML template code prior to the release of Pixaria 3.0.

User contributed features

Finally, an exciting development coming in the next release will be the inclusion of some interesting new features which have been kindly contributed by Matthias Zehnder, a Pixaria user in Switzerland. I will be providing more details about these new features nearer the release date but they include mapping tools, major improvements to the news blog, gallery announcement tools and numerous other small refinements.

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