A year after the 0.7 release, the major update to iPAP is finally here. A beta of the 0.9 code is now available to everyone, featuring two major changes: MySQL storage and labels.
Features
I deferred using MySQL, sticking to my textfile–based storage class until I discovered it was causing significant slowdowns in page generation. Now, SQL–based storage is the only road forward.
I mentioned labels months ago, which is a nice way of categorizing albums. In a way, it’s a product of the folksonomy trend everyone has gone gaga about. Labels are applied to photo albums and not photos, at least for now. I personally think tagging every single photo is overkill, even adding descriptions can be tiresome.
Performance
Currently, performance is far from snappy, but still better than version 0.7. The template caching system does its job well, reducing page generation to a minimum. Don’t bother playing with the $cache_life value unless you know what you’re doing.
Beta software
I hesitantly tagged this as “beta” because of the negative connotation it might produce. It is not a reflection of the applications’s quality. It’s classified as such because some features are still upcoming, and some may work differently in future releases.
For fellow developers digging into the code, please be gentle. Specific parts of the codebase need optimization, and not everything you see will be there in the next release. The code is not an indication of features to come or the project’s direction.
Upcoming
Comments: This has been the most requested by far, and will probably be ready by 1.0. Nothing too complicated, just a simple comment system for photos.
RSS: These days, everything has XML feeds. We’re late, but we’ll be there.
FTP uploads: A system will be in place for those who prefer to add photos via FTP. Related to this will be support for zip uploads.
WordPress plugin: Most likely related to RSS, I’m thinking of a WP plugin to display your iPAP stream in your WP–powered blog, similar to Flickr.
I guess that’s all for now. Most of what you need to know is in the project’s page; everything else a few clicks and keystrokes away in case you’re too shy to leave a comment.
Nice work! I really like the labels, they do much to easily sort different albums. 🙂
Will thumbnail pagination be a feature in up-coming versions of iPAP (I asked the same question in an earlier comment)? Also, how can I convert non-english characters to “friendly mode”, say ‘Ã¥’ and ‘ä’ to ‘a’ and ‘ö’ to ‘o’ in links?
Markku, will it also support stats on picture views and such? I’m excited to see it lifted from beta. 🙂
Yuga, see
urlencode()and rawurlencode().Markku, exams are over! I'll continue the 1337 c0d1ng the next days, "starting anew" from (well, porting my changes to) this release that is. w00t!
Pagination is not yet on my list of things to do, but I’ll think about it and see if we really need it. Regarding non-international characters, I’m sorry I’m clueless about that right now. Maybe Mathias can help?
Right now that isn’t planned, but I’m sure we can adopt some other open-source traffic tracking script if we choose to. I’d love to take it out of beta, once I get the next important features implemented without problems. 😉
Nice to hear that! We’d love to hear your thoughts on iPAP once you get to play with it. 😉
hehehe… too eager to upgrade, I guess I screwed my photo gallery this time. Not sure what went wrong though.
The question is, what exactly are you trying to do? Could you provide some more information as to on what pages you need this, and as to what this is, too? 🙂 I suppose you’re talking about escaped characters in IRIs, is that correct? If so, we’d need to work on something with the PHP functions I linked…
Sorry for my lousy explanation! 😛 Simply put, I would like iPAP to convert a non-english title for an album – say “Skön semester pÃ¥ Ã…land” in Swedish (eng. “Wonderful holiday on Ã…land”) – so that the URL to the album is http://www.mydomain.com/photos/skon-semester-pa-aland. As for now, the URL would become http://www.mydomain.com/photos/skn-semester-pa-land.
Basically, the following characters could be converted: Å, å, Ä, ä, Ö, ö.
Functions removed due to display problems. –markku
This should solve your problem. Perhaps you could integrate this into iPAP, Markku? Oh, and as for the comments: Milestone One is reached! Comments are pulled from the database and displayed without any problems. Now I only need to create an admin interface but first of all, allow people to actually post comments. (Manually inserting them into the database is teh sux.)
Okay, so WordPress did fuck up. And you don’t allow
PREin comments, which is sad 🙁More code removed because of more display problems… 😉 –markku
Mathias, haha it did make my layout funky. 😉 I’ll strip the comments for now, but if you could email me those code snippets that would be lovely. 😀
And I’m very pleased to hear about the comments. 😉