Release note / Piwigo 2.5.0

New group manager, Improved user comments, Better icons

2.5.0
Download Piwigo 2.5.0

Released on March 4th, 2013

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Version 2.5 brings both functionnal and technical changes, from new icons to group manager, including external authentication such as OpenID or Wordpress.com. Piwigo 2.5 in numbers: 30+ new features, 900+ code changes performed by 7 developers and 100+ translators, 4 new languages expanding Piwigo to 51 languages out of the box, 8 months of preparation.

User comments: Email and Website added

User comments ask for an email and website. By default, these new fields are not mandatory.

Tag duplication

On screen [Administration > Photos > Tags] you can duplicate tags. Piwigo will also duplicate associations with photos.

Pagination on albums

Pagination on albums, just like on thumbnails. You can modify the number of albums per page on screen [Administration > Configuration > Options > Display].

Batch manager: filter on dimensions

In the Batch Manager, you can filter photos on dimensions (width, height and ratio). We have also added some quick links for specific ratios:

Group manager

Piwigo gets an improved group manager. Just like the photo batch manager, you can apply an action to several groups at once. With the new group manager, you can merge and duplicate groups.

Better looking icons

Better icons for default theme Elegant. Icons from Entypo pictograms by Daniel Bruce and Typicons by Stephen Hutchings.

Connect with Facebook, Google, OpenID...

With the new plugin oAuth, your visitors can log in with external authentication: Google, Facebook, OpenID, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, Windows Live, Flickr, Wordpress and Yahoo!.

Temporary image while loading

Since Piwigo 2.4, when displaying thumbnails, you can sometimes see that the thumbnail is not available because Piwigo has to generate it. With Piwigo 2.5, if the thumbnail is not available we display a default icon, which is replaced by the thumbnail as soon as possible, without reloading the page.

51 languages

Piwigo 2.5 adds 4 new languages compared to Piwigo 2.4.0: Galician (Galego), Lithuanian (Lietuvių), Tamil (தமிழ்), Hong-Kong (中文香港). That's another huge piece of work from the translation team. Translators have adopted the translation platform.

Physical vs virtual albums

On albums list, you can easily see the physical albums (physcial album = created as a FTP directory).

Protection of original photos

We have implemented an advanced protection for original photos. In your local configuration file, add $conf['original_url_protection'] = 'images'; and in the upload (+ galleries if you add photos through FTP) add a .htaccess file with Deny from all. You will still be able to download original photos but not with a direct link.

Tag exclusion in quick search

The query "john -natasha" will find all photos tagged john and exclude all photos tagged natasha.

IP address and sessions

By default, Piwigo associate an IP address to each visitor session. Sometimes it is a problem when you're behind a badly configured proxy which changes IP address on each web browser request. This is why we have added an advanced configuration setting to let you disable this security. Simply add $conf['session_use_ip_address'] = false; in your local configuration file.

Technical Features

Please note that more detailed documentation is available about Technical changes in Piwigo 2.5. Please read it to make your extensions compatible with Piwigo 2.5.

New web API explorer

The Piwigo web API explorer gets a new graphical design. You can open it with your web browser, on your Piwigo installation on tools/ws.htm

increased security on passwords

Password security is strongly improved with the use of PasswordHash class. This class performs salt and multiple iterations. Already used in Wordpress, Drupal, phpBB and many other web applications. MD5 passwords will be gradually and automatically updated to salted passwords.

mysqli library for MySQL

If available, Piwigo will use PHP mysqli extension for MySQL queries, instead of the old PHP mysql extension. Developers, please check your plugins because mysql_* functions are broken.

JSmin replaced by JavaScriptPacker

JSmin and JavaScriptPacker PHP classes do the same job: minify javascript files. We have replaced JSmin with JavaScriptPacker because JSmin was not really opensource, as expected by Debian (which packages Piwigo).

Sprite for flags

In the language switch box, instead of loading 51 flag files, ie 51 HTTP requests, all flags are now on a single picture file and CSS rules split the picture correctly in your web browser.

Sessions can store infos, errors and warnings

In plugins, you can now use $_SESSION['page_infos'], $_SESSION['page_errors'], $_SESSION['page_warnings'] to transmit various messages on page reload.

Add triggers on all main pages

New triggers loc_begin_* and loc_end_* on comments.php, identification.php, notification.php, password.php, profile.php, register.php, search.php, tags.php. We try to make plugin developer life simpler!

Add template method to sort action buttons

Introduction of two template methods to add buttons to index page and picture page toolbars, allowing you to place buttons relative to each other : $template->add_picture_button($content, $rank); $template->add_index_button($content, $rank);

jquery 1.8.3, jquery.ui 1.10.1

New versions of jQuery, jQuery UI and other jQuery plugins we use in Piwigo Core (colorbox, chosen, crop)

Earlier detection of mobile device

Many plugins are not compatible with the mobile theme. To increase performances, when detecting mobile device we store the information in the session as a cache. Checking is now much faster.

Triggers for login system

We have added 3 triggers: user_login, user_logout, try_log_user. It makes plugins for external authentication easier to create (such as oAuth).