Hello Piwigo community,

Piwigo team is proud to announce the first "release candidate" 2.2.0RC1. This release is for test only, so don't install it on your live website. The purpose of this release candidate is to discover changes since 2.1.x and to give your user feedback. This way we can fix bugs, improve things and prepare a robust version 2.2.0.

New functionnal features:

* categories renamed into albums
* image / picture / element renamed into photo
* administrator can automatically sort albums and sub-albums in a few clicks
* a protection was added to prevent robots from registering
* ability to remove or resize the high definition version of the photo in the upload form (requires ImageMagick on the server)
* new web API methods for administration purpose (activate a theme, deactivate a plugin, move an album, delete a photo)
* ability to delete photos added with synchronization like other photos, with just a few clicks
* new batch manager 1) filter 2) select 3) apply an action
* week may start on sunday in your calendar
* basic multisite feature, ability to have several galleries with a single Piwigo installed
* the user upload was removed from core and a better one will be added in the Community plugin
* the adviser mode was removed
* automatic rotation of the photo based on EXIF Orientation
* ability to delete a single photo from its administration screen
* ability to clean orphan tags in a single click (automatic detection)
* if the album representative photo has a Family privacy level, then all Friends visitors will have another random representative photo instead

... and also at technical level:

* if available, automatically use ImageMagick instead of GD for photo resizing
* CSS and Javascript files are combined to reduce the number of HTTP requests
* core themes use CSS sprites for icons to reduce the number of HTTP requests
* performances improved when browsing tags linked to many photos
* the representative photo of each album is cached for each user, this may avoid many database requests if you have a deep album tree

Download Piwigo 2.2.0RC1

Please, try to open a new topic in the beta testing forum for each problem your encounter, it will be much simpler to close issues.

Beta testing made easy: if you want to beta test but don't have the appropriate environment, send me a private message with the subject "beta-testing Piwigo 2.2"

Note: there is no upgrade script from any previous release of Piwigo, we will add it in the next weeks.