Gallery 2.0 Beta 2

Welcome to Gallery 2.0. This is the third “Beta” release of Gallery 2, code named “Bingo!”. Please read through this document carefully before installing Gallery 2 and before asking for help. We have taken care to try to answer as many of your questions here as possible. If you don't read this and have problems, we may refer you back to this document as a first resource.

Contents

Quick Start

If you’re impatient like us, you just want to get going. The odds are that your system is all set to handle Gallery 2 so just skip right to the installer and start clicking. It should walk you through everything you need to get going. Before you do that, you should really read the When to use Gallery 2 Beta and When not to use Gallery 2 Beta sections! But if you hit a snag, please come back here and read more before asking questions! Enjoy.

What is Gallery?

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums and photos can have read, write, caption and other permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

What is Gallery 2 Beta?

A Beta release is the second official round of releases of a product. A Beta release can sometimes be unstable, contains both known and unknown bugs. Generally, almost all of the features of the final product will be present. We release it early so that you can see what is coming and give us feedback that will help us improve the final release.

Gallery 2 Beta requirements

When to use Gallery 2 Beta

You should install Gallery 2 Beta to try it out. You could install it next to your production version of Gallery 1 in a hidden directory. You could install it on a development server. We want you to try it, test it, break it, and tell us all about it. Get your friends and colleagues to poke around. You can use the migration module to import some or all of your Gallery 1 albums into Gallery 2 for test purposes (this shouldn’t affect your Gallery 1 installation at all).

When not to use Gallery 2 Beta

Do not use it as the main repository for your data. Do not use it for a production web site. Although we provide an upgrade path we will not provide the same level of support for Gallery 2 that we provide for Gallery 1 until we get to release candidates. We know that Gallery 2 is much better than Gallery 1, and it may be tempting to just replace your Gallery 1 with it. But we're still making plenty of changes and mistakes happen so if you use it in production, be prepared to dig into it yourself and fix things if they break.

Warning!

Gallery 2 has not yet been subjected to a rigorous security audit! While we have taken great pains to make sure that it is secure, there is still the chance that there are some big security holes in it that might cause you trouble. If you find a security flaw, do not hesitate to email us at:
security AT gallery.menalto.com

What’s new in Gallery 2 Beta

Gallery 2 has been redesigned from the ground up and is database driven! It is secure, scalable, reliable, modular, customizable, portable and intuitive. In short, we looked at all the things we did wrong in Gallery 1 and we did them again the right way. Two and a half years of design and development have gone into Gallery 2. It’s got customizable themes and layouts using XHTML compliant templates which makes it much easier for you to personalize your Gallery 2 install. All the cool bells and whistles are in modules that can be enabled separately for maximum control.

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 (Next Release) -

  1. Multisite Support - The multisite system has been completely redesigned and is now compatible with both URL Rewrite module and embedded G2. Multisite G2 refers to multiple independent sites using a single codebase.
  2. Localization - The installer and upgrader can now be localized.

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Beta 3 (Bingo!) +

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Beta 2 (Holy Hand Grenade) +

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Beta 1 (Dark Fibre) +

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Alpha 4 (Nice Commits) +

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Alpha 3 (Farva) +

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Alpha 2 (Grand Theft Photo) +

Highlight of changes in Gallery 2 Alpha 1 (Cowbell) +

Gallery 2 Beta Installation Prerequisites

  1. Latest Version - There are three ways to get the code.
  2. Storage - Create a directory for gallery to store photos. This must be writeable by the web server, but for security reasons we suggest that you do not put it in the web root. If you put it in the web root, then anybody can get directly to your images with their web browser which circumvents Gallery 2’s security.

    Unix Example

    $ cd $HOME
    $ mkdir g2data
    $ chmod 777 g2data

    Windows Example

    C:\> mkdir g2data
    In the Unix example, you may note that modes of 777 on your g2data directory are not all that secure. However, making it more secure depends on how your system is configured. Talk with your system administrator about ways to change the permissions on that directory to make it so that Gallery can still write to the files but that others can’t.
  3. Database - Right now we support MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle. MySQL is generally faster than PostgreSQL. We require you to create the database yourself. In our examples below, we’ll be creating a database called gallery2. You can use any database name that you choose.
    Grant all required privileges to your database user. This includes but is not confined to: CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, DROP TABLE in the gallery2 database; SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE on all (gallery2) tables in the gallery2 database; CREATE INDEX and some other privileges that are specific to the different database management systems. CREATE/DROP DATABASE and the ability to GRANT privileges to other database users are not required.

    MySQL

    $ mysqladmin -uroot create gallery2
    $ mysql gallery2 -uroot -e"GRANT ALL ON gallery2.* TO
      username@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password'"

    PostgreSQL

    $ createdb gallery2 -E UNICODE

    If it complains that UNICODE is not a valid encoding name, then try:
    $ createdb gallery2 -E SQL_ASCII

    If it complains about that, too then try:
    $ createdb gallery2

    Oracle

    $ create database gallery2 {additional parameters};
  4. Graphics Toolkits - Gallery 2 works with NetPBM, ImageMagick or GD. They’re all equally good, though some say that NetPBM has slightly better quality and that ImageMagick is slightly faster than NetPBM. GD can be very fast, but it will also use a lot of memory so it may cause you to run into predefined server limits. It is also compiled into PHP by default if your PHP is 4.3.0 or more recent, however it may not have support for all image types (e.g. it might not have JPEG support). If the binaries for NetPBM and ImageMagick are installed in default, or standard, locations then Gallery 2 will auto-detect them during Gallery 2 installation. It won’t cause any harm to enable all of these toolkits—in fact you’ll get the widest file type support if you do so.

Installing Gallery 2 Beta

Gallery 2 is a web application and must be installed on your web server in order for you to use it. If you've unpacked it on your desktop, you will have to upload it to your server as part of the install process, then you can configure it using your web browser.

  1. Authenticate - You will be asked to create and save a small text file in order to authenticate. You may not proceed until you do this. That’s how Gallery 2 knows that you’re authorized to use the installer.
  2. System Checks - The installer checks your system to make sure that it will support Gallery 2. Make sure that all checks are successful!
  3. Multisite Setup - Gallery can support multiple independent sites with a single installation of the code. Here you will select a standard single install or the location of a new multisite install.
  4. Admin User Setup - You are prompted for an administrator username and password. In this beta release the default Admin username is set to admin and cannot be changed during the install process (though you can change it to something else later on). Type in a password and type it again to validate it. Then click ’Create’ to create the admin user for this installation of Gallery 2.
  5. Storage Setup - Read the instructions on the installer to set up a storage location for Gallery 2. This is where Gallery 2 will store all of your images, as well as other cache information.
  6. Database Setup - Select your database type and enter your database authentication information.
  7. Create Config File - Gallery 2 will create the config.php file in your Gallery 2 directory. This contains all the answers you’ve provided in the installer and is necessary for Gallery 2 to function properly.
  8. Install the Core module - Here’s where we create all the database tables and initial users and albums to get you started. Unless something goes wrong, there’s nothing for you to do here.
  9. Install other modules - Gallery 2 has lots of different modules that provide useful functionality. Choose which ones you want to use. You can always go to the Site Admin page later on to install, activate, deactivate or uninstall modules, so it’s ok to experiment here.
  10. Check Security - Gallery 2 walks you through the process of locking down your new config.php.
  11. Finished! - Congratulations! You have successfully installed Gallery 2 Beta!

Getting started with Gallery 2 Beta

  1. Log in - Once you’ve successfully got Gallery 2 Beta installed, you should start by logging in as the admin user that was created for you at install time. The admin user has special privileges that you’ll need in order to administer your new Gallery 2.
  2. Activate Graphics Toolkits - Click on the Site Admin link then the Modules link to see the module list. Install, configure and activate one of the NetPBM, ImageMagick, or GD modules. You can activate as many of them as you want (more is better, here).
  3. Add photos - Browse back to the top of your new Gallery 2 and click on the Add Items link. This will bring up a page with a few different upload options (at least 3, more if you have other upload modules installed). Select the one you want and try adding a new photo to your album. If all goes well, you should see the new photos in your Gallery!.
  4. Add an album - You don't want to put all of your images into the top level of your Gallery 2, so you should try creating a new album. Browse back to the top of your new Gallery 2 and click on the add sub-album link from the left side of the page. This will give you a form where you can enter information about the new album you want to create. Fill it out and click the Create button. Now try adding images to that album instead, or select the Move Photo link from under any of the images you added earlier and move them into this new album.
  5. Import Gallery 1 albums - you can easily import albums from Gallery 1. It won’t cause any harm to your Gallery 1. Just go to the Migration Page and enter the path to your Gallery 1 albums directory and then follow the instructions.
  6. Plenty to do and see! -

Getting Help

If you have problems, you should start by looking in the Gallery 2 Support Forum on the Gallery Website. Search the forum to see if somebody else has posted a similar problem and maybe there’s an answer there, otherwise start a new topic to get help. If the problem seems like a bug in the Gallery 2 software you can file a bug in our bug tracker on SourceForge. Please read our tracker guidelines before filing a bug so that we can cut down on the number of spurious reports. If you're unsure whether to file a bug you can always post in the forums first and we'll ask you to file a bug if needed. If you want to talk about development issues, you can you can try to catch one of the Gallery 2 developers on our irc channel, #gallery-support on irc.freenode.net. Our developers use this IRC channel as our primary means of communication, so if they ask you to post in the forums please respect their request. If we spend all of our time doing tech support, we won't have time to write Gallery 2.

Remember – reporting bugs is good. Even if you think it’s silly, go ahead and report it. We can always close the bug or refile it (please don’t be offended in this case) but it’s harder to find bugs than it is to fix them so we’re counting on you to help us with the finding part.

Known Issues / Bugs

  1. Login Problems - There are known login problems where Gallery 2 seems to ignore a login request. In a first attempt to fix the problem most scenarios have been fixed, but we are still working on the complete solution. As a consequence of our changes you'll have to delete the GALLERYSID cookie(s) in your browser after an upgrade from version beta-2 (or prior) to beta-3 (or later).
  2. Layouts/Themes - The current layout and theme architecture is going to change sometime during the beta cycle. We are still considering several different approaches to make creating new themes, layouts and modules easier.
  3. Performance - This beta release is faster than the previous alphas/betas. There are still some tweaks that we have planned that will make it even faster. We’ve still focused on features and reliability before performance, and will be continually optimizing during the beta cycle.
  4. URL Redirection - Rewrite module and Gallery 1-»Gallery 2 URL redirection do not work together in the same .htaccess file (Gallery 2 is installed where Gallery 1 used to be). In future these will be compatible.
  5. Multisite config.php - The multisite system has changed and old style multisite config.php files are no longer supported. Follow these steps to move your sites to the new system:

Updating your Gallery 2 Installation

Updating is quick and easy and should not lose any of your data.

  1. Get the latest code and unpack it over your existing copy of Gallery 2. Keep your existing config.php in place, and don't touch your (g2data) data folder or the database.
  2. If you use a PHP accelerator / cache (e.g. Turk mmCache, Ioncube PHPA, eaccelerator, Zend Studio, etc.), flush (clear) the cache of the accelerator. Omitting this step can sometimes lead to errors during and after the upgrade process.
  3. Browse to the upgrader and follow the instructions there. Make a backup of your data (g2data folder and the database) when it tells you to! Should you lose your data due to a bug in the upgrader, the first thing we're going to tell you to do is to restore from your backups! (Then we'll probably ask you to help us reproduce the bug.)
  4. Enjoy your new version of Gallery 2.

Advanced Topics

Unit Tests - Gallery 2 was designed using Extreme Programming methodologies. This means that we have a ton of unit tests that help us make sure that the code is behaving as it should. If you want to help us out, you can try running the unit tests and report back to us if any of them fail. Note - these tests shouldn’t change your Gallery 2 settings at all, but if they fail, they may leave things in a weird state. Be warned that you might have to ditch your Gallery 2 data and start over if something catastrophic happens.

Test Harness - We also have an older test harness that we use to do some load testing type tasks that might be fun to experiment with. Try creating 1000 users or a random tree of 5,000 photos to see what it’s like.

Localization - If you’re interested in localizing Gallery 2 into another language, you can review the current state of localization and then read the localization how-to and get started. Submit your localizations early and often - no need to wait until you’re entirely done.

For Developers - We've gotten started on some developer documentation that you should read if you want to start hacking on Gallery 2. Some of the information is a little bit out of date or in early drafts, but it's a start.

Embedding - See this forum topic for the status of the integration modules to embed Gallery 2 in various applications. This documentation explains how to setup an integrated environment or build the integration module for a new application.

This page is valid XHTML 1.0 Gallery 2.0 beta-3+

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