WoltLab Community Forum

After announcing the functions of the new blog, we now proceed with the update of the gallery plug-in. Some of the new functions of the blog will also be found in the new gallery in a similar way.

Global Categories
The gallery now also gets "global categories". The administrator can set them up and give users or user groups the permission to use them. Images as well as albums may be categorized by one ore more categories.



Overview page for images
The gallery overview page has also been subject to a major overhaul. There is a brand new side-bar, providing an overview of the newest or top-rated albums and their images. The side-bar also offers a bunch of useful filtering options to be able to find interesting images more efficiently. You can now filter by category, or find the most-commented ones for example. The side-bar is most flexible, all boxes can be moved and disabled by the admin and even be extended by plugins.

There is a new overall statistics box at the bottom of the overview page like the one you already know from the forum.



Overview page for albums
There's a new overview page for albums also now. It's identical with the one for images, but you'll be able to filter albums here instead of images.



Global map
Image geo-tagging is a very useful feature and we wanted it to be even more involved in the new gallery. We start with a central map where the shooting location of all images of the gallery as well as images within a given radius can be found.

Geotagging
As previously announced we want to integrate the Geotagging feature even more in the update for the gallery. So far, the gallery was reliant on coordinates that were embedded in the image data (EXIF), which was only the case when using cameras with GPS function. With the update, the coordinates can now be entered manually. Either directly by reference to longitude and latitude, or alternatively via the positioning of a marker on a map.



When viewing an image, the selected position is then displayed to the right as usual in a small map. A new addition there is the possibility to enlarge the map.



The coordinates are used for map displays on various parts of the gallery. As seen in the previous entry, there is now a radius search. This is both available globally (all images) and individually in the user gallery. In addition, each album has its own map, where the coordinates of the images in the album are listed.

Albums and images administration (ToDo)
The management of your own pictures and albums has been extended and improved to make the service more user-friendly and to offer the user more design options. E.g. Albums can now be tagged as well. The images and albums descriptions now also support simple formatting such as URL and Smileys. In addition, images can be sorted in an album via "drag and drop" - that is, the exact order of the images in the display can be set. The sorting of images in an album has been simplified by us, images can now be selected and moved as group into a specific album. The new selecting feature also allows multiple images to be erased simultaneously.



Titles and descriptions of images can now be edited "inline". When editing pictures, the user has the possibility to replace the image by a new one, all other data are being retained (title, description, etc.). The processing interface of images was also complemented by the possibility to jump to the next or previous image, so you can process multiple images very quickly, one after the other. Furthermore, the system now supports ZIP archives for the simultaneous upload of multiple images.

More interaction
Both images or entire albums can now be rated by users. In addition, like in the new Blog version, image views are counted in the new Gallery version, and there are overall statistics and support of social bookmarks.

More User Friendly
Image titles and descriptions can now be searched using the search function. We also have revised the slideshow feature slightly. In addition to the enlarged image in the center now the previous and next frame is being displayed as a preview displayed on the left and right.



The new, so-called sorting bar is used for the first time in the Gallery. It offers the familiar function from the thread listing, to quickly and easily change a sorting by table headers. The sorting bar will also be used in the new Blog and will be involved on other places of our software in the long term.



A convenient navigation in a gallery or an album was very important to us. We have revised that little navigation box which displays the previous and next frame as a forecast. On the top bar you can normally jump to the previous or next image, and now also to the first or last. In the actual box you can now scroll "inline" through the images without having to reload the page.



As seen in the first entry, we have chosen a very small thumbnails for the boxes on the overview page. In order to compensate this somewhat, these images have a built-in zoom function in the form of a small balloon.



Privacy
Users can already restrict the access to their personal profiles to be visible only for friends. Then automatically all images in the gallery are accessible only for friends. With the Gallery update it will now be possible to make individual albums visible for friends only. Pictures and albums that are visible only for friends appear also no longer as thumbnails on the overview page. The owner of the pictures also gets a little graphic which shows, whether an image is private.

Costs
Similar to the Blog, the Gallery plugin will be available for a one-time price of USD 39,99 including 19% VAT, with the release of the final version 1.1. As with the Blog, any other update is included in the update access of the associated Burning Board license. The beta of version 1.1 will be offered as a trial version with limited duration (analogous to the beta phase of Burning Board 3.0 or 3.1). The existing version of Community Gallery (1.0) remains included at no additional cost in the Burning Board 3.1 license. This version will no longer be separately developed by us and is subject only to customary product support (two-year fixes).

The new gallery version can now be see live here in the forum:
http://www.woltlab.com/forum/index.php?p…GalleryOverview

The SEO function for the new Gallery-plugin version has just been installed here.

Exif data
Of particular interest for photo-communities are the Exif data in images. In beta 5 of the Gallery plugin we have now integrated a function that reads EXIF data and displays them in a box in the right sidebar. The function can be turned off in the admin interface as usual.

An example of an image with EXIF data is shown here: Hofeinfahrt