Community Server v1.0 Beta1 Released
Community Server v1.0 Beta1 was released today (ScottW's post, announcement on communityserver.org).
So far, it has been released for about 2 hours and we've already had a flood of feedback (and bug reports, but hey, its beta). If you have any issues with it, please check out and post in the Bugs & Issues forum on communityserver.org.
Community Server :: Galleries differs from nGallery in a couple of ways:
- Albums are now called Categories. One nice thing is that a single picture can belong to multiple categories.
- Can no longer specify a highlighted picture for a category. The field to specify one just isn't there. It will added in the future, but right now, it is not available. The next release of Community Server will show a random picture in the header instead of the folder icon.
- Cannot have subcategories, at this time. This might get added for the next release, but a way to specify a parent just hasn't been added.
- No watermarking feature for images. The nGallery watermarking was a little problematic (especially with using images). This will be coming back in the future once we can make it a little more thought out.
There are also major improvements in Community Server :: Galleries over nGallery:
- Entirely SQL based with great caching. In nGallery, using the XML storage, it would eat a lot of memory when you had a lot of pictures. Using nGallery's SQL storage, it generated far too much database traffic. Community Server keeps everything to a minimum and have put a lot of thought into caching data and figuring out what is used most often.
- Multi-user! Can finally configure multiple users and give them permissions as to whether or not they can upload images or not. Can also specify whether or not they can login and view the gallery or not.
- Ability to have multiple galleries. You can have multiple users, each with their own galleries and pictures. Think a .Text site, but with photos. I'm working on a write up for the final release which will cover how to use it in a single site setup.
- Vastly improved skinning. Without saying, the skinning in nGallery was rather complicated and scared many people away from making their own skin (including myself!). Community Server's is much much easier. Just look in the ~/Themes/default/Skins/Galleries folder and the main pages you'll have to modify are Skin-GalleryDefault.ascx, Skin-ViewGallery.ascx, Skin-ViewCategory.ascx, Skin-ViewPicture.ascx, and Skin-PictureListing.ascx (should be somewhat obvious what each one is a view of). Everything is in there and is all based on user controls. The other files in the folder are for some of the smaller components or for the admin pages.
One of the main questions many people have is how can I migrate from nGallery to Community Server? The answer for right now is that you can't. We don't have converters yet for either of the components. I have started working on a conversion tool for the Galleries and it will be available with the final release. In the meantime, the beta is mostly intented to toy around with and isn't yet recommended to use it as a replacement.