Well, yesterday officially marked the first alpha release of imagefield_gallery 2.0. This is a signficant upgrade in terms of administration UI, and I've got some new features in the pipe for this one as well. Unfortunately I made the mistake of leaving out some css/js files for the first alpha release and I've been fighting with CVS a bit to try to fix the issue. I'm hoping my most recent release will handle this problem.
New Stuff:
The Administration was 2 different pages, these pages gave a user access to ALL of the different administration details for content type settings and css settings. Unfortunately, this system gave users a few too many options, and as such, it made for a less usable interface. The new interface has been streamlined into one main page, and from there there are individual sub-pages that allow users to alter eligable content types, and update their css settings. Along with that comes some "at-a-glance" details about your content types, the fields they're using and what your css settings are with out actually navigating to the individual pages. I'm hoping that this will make for a nicer experience over all. This did however require a couple of extra hooks into the gallery modules, so if you happen to be one of the 2 groups who have told me about galleries you built that hooked into imagefield_gallery, then be aware, you're going to need to do some upgrade. Additionally a few of the hooks scope have changed, and you may need to take that into consideration (I certainly did). Also worth mentioning... if you have a gallery that hooks into imagefield gallery... GIVE IT BACK! The community could certainly use a few more gallery types.
Upcoming Features:
This brings me to my next point which is that I WILL be building a new gallery type for this release. So by the time we hit beta, I should have 2 gallery types to choose from. Adding to the list of new features is the long talked about, but never implemented node-reference feature. I've been talking about this one for a while, and it's finally starting to take shape. This should allow you to attach imagefield_galleries to nodes with a node reference to nodes with imagefields on them... that's a confusing sentence. Suffice it to say, you'll be able to have a node type with a node reference widget on it. And if that widget references nodes with imagefields attached to them, then imagefield gallery can pull those images and display them in a gallery as though the images were attached to a single node.
I'm hoping this proves useful, I have a usecase for it right now, however, the nature of "multi-value" node references is making me a little leery at the moment. I'm still wondering why it doesn't work the same way free tagging taxonomy works. But that's not really my issue at the moment, so perhaps a discussion for another day.
Points of interest:
It's also worth noting that I'm considering a move to stop supporting imagefield 1/imagecache 1 with the 2.x release cycle of imagefield_gallery. This is an effort to keep the world in general moving forward, but also an effort to keep my code as clean/lean/drupaly as possible. I'm still unsure of my feelings in this regard as it will require all users to be php4+ compatible. But there are a lot of good reasons to help force people in that direction, so perhaps there's no harm. I'd really love some feedback on this particular issue.
