• About
• Features
• Tech Specs
• Demo Website
• Requirements
• Get Web Hosting
• Get Design Services
• Sell Photos Online

• Further Info
• About Pixaria
• Privacy
• Send E-mail

• Feeds
• Pixaria News
• Documentation
• Twitter

• Works With

Pixaria 2.8.5 Released

I'm pleased to report that Pixaria Gallery version 2.8.5 is now available for all registered users of Pixaria 2. This is a major new release which includes a lot of new features and improvements that have been requested by users over the last few months.

Probably the biggest change is the inclusion of new tools that make it possible to create groups of products that can be linked to galleries. In this way Pixaria now offers a much greater level of control over how administrators sell and price image products for different galleries.

Still on the theme of e-commerce capabilities, the admin area now includes significantly improved sales management tools which have been completely re-designed to make them easier to use. A frequent request from users has been to have an additional status setting for sales between 'paid' and 'complete' that will make it easier to manage transactions where physical products have not yet been shipped. I'm happy to say that this new status option is now included alongside a new sales filter tool to make finding sales by customer name and status quick and easy.

Other enhancements to the admin area include improved image download reporting tools, CSV export of lightbox contents and image download reports, an improved Pixie (plug-in) manager, options for random avatar images on galleries and easier to use transaction admin tools.

Away from the admin area, there are a number of other big changes in version 2.8.5 including a new batch download feature available from users' lightboxes. This makes it easy for users to download images in one convenient zip file rather than having to manually download images one at a time. Note that this feature requires PHP 5 and the Zlib library which shouldn't be a problem if you're using a decent hosting company.

For users with larger libraries of images, this update also features performance enhancements in the front-end that will dramatically speed up page load times while simultaneously reducing load on the server where Pixaria is installed. The graph below shows the page load time for a Pixaria homepage with a library containing 180,000 images and 4,000 libraries. The difference in page load times when using version 2.8.4 and the new version 2.8.5 is dramatic - 2.8.5 clocks in at only two seconds compared to 15 seconds with the older version of Pixaria.

As usual there are plenty of minor bugs fixes and improvements in this update and I'm pleased to report that, there is now a Russian translation included. My thanks go to Konstantin Filimonov for the translation.

Finally, big thanks again go to Matthias Zehnder who has contributed a large number of bug fixes and improvements to the geo-coding, mapping and blogging tools (among others) in this update.

To get this update, please drop me an e-mail at upgrade@pixaria.com and I'll send the new version to you. As always, please take a moment to check out the release notes and change log before upgrading as these contain full details of all the modifications in this version.

Comments for this article