Gallery 2.2 RC1 Released today!

It’s 12:03 in the night and after solving a bunch of USMLE world question, I was bored and just about to go to sleep when I decided to check upon gallery2 website. And wola! there stood a marvelous link to download gallery 2.2 RC1

Gallery is an open source web based photo album organizer. Gallery gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you’re running a small personal site or a large community site. You will find an example of gallery on my photo site

1. Downloadable Plugins. This feature allows you to download and install Modules and Themes directly via the Site Admin interface. You can select from different sets of plugins (officially released plugins, experimental plugins under development and plugins provided by the Gallery community). This makes it very easy to stay up to date with the latest changes.
2. Added support for themes to display dynamic albums.

* New Keyword Album module makes use of this feature to show albums based on a search of item keywords.

* New Dynamic Albums module shows albums of newest, most viewed or even random items.

* Ratings module has a new view to display highly rated items from across the Gallery.

3. Watermarking changes

* Edit Album now has a Watermark tab where watermarks may be added or removed from an entire album, optionally including subalbums too.

* Edit Watermark now has an option to replace a watermark image and apply the new image everywhere the old was one used.

* New option to always use a single watermark and give users no watermarking options. Only Site Admins can change/remove existing watermarks.

* New option to turn off the ability for users to upload their own watermark images.

4. New themes:

* Carbon

* Ajaxian

5. New WebDAV module to mount Gallery as network device on your computer. This allows you to easily manage your Gallery with any WebDAV client like Windows Explorer.
6. New module to send Ecards.
7. New Digibug module for prints from digibug.com
8. Added support for Flash Video and Windows ASF video
9. Added support for mp3 audio using a Flash based player.
10. Added support for HTTP authentication through the new httpauth module.
11. Photo auto-rotation based on camera sensors or on settings from other applications.
12. Automatically detect dimensions of Flash animations and video.
Option in MIME module to restrict file types that may be uploaded.
13. Image Block changes

* Now displays any item with a thumbnail (movie, flash, etc) in addition to photos.

* A new block setting allows showing multiple images or albums.

14. Added some user contributed image frames and icon packs including the Silk Icon set by Mark James.
15. You can now add color to item title, description, comments, etc. Click on the “color” button and choose from a handy popup; or just use [color=red] bbcode syntax.
16. Comment module improvements:

* New block for adding comments directly from an item page.

* Guests can now leave their name.

17. Added support in Link Items module to make thumbnails for URL links using webpage snapshots generated by an external program like khtml2png. Also, the arrow watermark on thumbnails is now optional.
18. Added RSS functionality: Comments for this album and its subalbums.
19. Added Quotas Block: This allows the site administrator to display a block in the theme that displays the current and total usage of any user that has a quota assigned.
20. Added an option to lock a user account to the current account settings. Useful if one wants to use a single user account for a group of users.
21. Newly created albums from User Albums module now properly inherit permissions from the parent album, for settings like comments, ratings, etc.
22. Moved some functionality out of core and into optional modules: Add items module for adding from local server or other web pages, and Replica module for creating item copies sharing the same original data file.
23. Option in EXIF/IPTC module to set title for new items from IPTC/ObjectName.
Improved usability in administration interface for installing modules and themes.
24. New Multiroot module assists in creating alternate guest views of a single Gallery.
25. Added exactSize and link parameters for image block.
26. Resize dimensions now accept percentages of full size in addition to pixel size.
27. Minimum PHP version now 4.3.0.
28. Added support for PHP mysqli extension (newer version of mysql interface).
29. Support for MSSQL database.
The full article can be found here

Known bugs and troubleshooting guide could be found here

You may ask how does this affect you. Well for beginners, some of the enhancements will be soon visible on my site. Like sharing mp3 , flash and video articles. For the open source community as a whole, It means a reason to celebrate as another version of a great open source application is out in the market.

Ok now it’s time for me to go to bed. I’ll install gallery2.2 RC1 on my server tomorrow and will let you guys know of the testing experience