We are thrilled to present Piwigo’s latest update!
This 2.10 version marks a turning point in Piwigo’s history, as it is the first step for a new Piwigo, redesigned according to current standards. The journey is not over yet, still we are proud of the work that has been made by our talented designers. But design is nothing without user oriented features brought to you by our dedicated developement team and great contributors.
Let us lead you through this Piwigo 2.10 release note!
Modus is the new default theme, with 8 new skins
Modus, a theme created a few years ago, becomes the default theme for Piwigo 2.10. Modus was selected because it is stable, compatible with high definition screens and compatible with many extensions. Last but not least, Modus is responsive. Meaning it automatically adapts to small screens such as a phones and to wide screens such as a televisions.
Here you can see the default skin "Newspaper" with a black and white colorscheme.
We didn’t simply make it the default theme, we also refreshed Modus with 8 new skins.
My name is Hannah, currently studying User eXperience (UX) design at ActivDesign in Rennes (France). I started working for Piwigo as an intern in January 2019, my main mission is to modernise the look of Piwigo.
Brainstorming with Pierrick, we decided to start with refreshing the default gallery theme. Firstly we switched to Modus for its responsivness, its capability to adapt to high definition display but nonetheless needed a visual update to comply with 2019 standards. Therefore I created 8 new skins, changing colors, spacing, hiding some buttons that weren’t needed, rounding corners... my favourite is Blueberry.
An overall redesign for the administration
New overall design, with new header, menubar and tabs. There is less borders, more empty spaces
Here you can see how the refreshed upload form behaves when no album is available yet.
My name is Samuel Lefebvre and I am a UX UI designer. As a trainee for Piwigo, my main role was to improve the aesthetics of the administration interfaces, i.e. User Interface (UI). I also worked to improve user workflow, i.e. User eXperience (UX).
Before starting the redesign of the administration, I spent a lot of time using it in order to better understand the difficulties that users could encounter. On the other hand, I also studied competition. I hope you’ll like this new vision of the Piwigo administration!
Dashboard gets a refresh
The administration dashboard now comes with colors!
New dark mode
The administration dashboard in our new dark mode. This colorscheme was designed for users working in low light environments. Of course background is "much" darker, but you’ll also notice fonts are less contrasted in sidebar menu. We want Piwigo to be comfortable for your eyes!
The upload form gets a new design
We have tried to make it as "nice and clean" as possible, so you can focus on the important task: uploading your photos.
First step, you select an album and some photos.
Second step, the transfer is running. You can see the remaining photos in the upload queue and thumbnails of the photos already uploaded.
Last step, Piwigo sums up the upload and gives you quick access to manage the uploaded photos, either individually or as a batch.
Album Manager, bigger and simpler
Album manager has been refreshed with big action buttons.
Progression for metadata sync
Instead of requesting to synchronize metadata on all photos at once, the batch manager smartly cuts the whole block into smaller blocks and shows a progress bar.
No more "execution time exceeded" with the new progress bar. Of course, we have made it slower for this demo, it’s much faster in reality
Check for upgrade action was moved
The "check for upgrade" action was moved from the Dashboard to the Maintenance page.
Admin help opens as a popin
The help on the administration page now opens as a popin (internal widget) instead of an old-styled popup.
We have deactivated user comments by default
Don’t panic, we’re not removing the feature, we just decided to turn it off by default. You might ask "Why turn off an existing feature?". Because too many features visible might scare people that are testing Piwigo. We need to smartly select what is most important for the majority.
On Piwigo.com, where we host thousands of Piwigos, we have some interesting statistics on used features. Concerning user comments, only 16% of Piwigo installations have more than 10 user comments. Moreover many of them are users using comments instead of photo descriptions.
Duplicates get a smarter sorting
The batch manager helps you to find duplicates photos. This feature is not new, but we improved it for Piwigo 2.10. Now if you search duplicates based on date, photos will be sorted by date, so that you can easily compare duplicates as series.
Here in Piwigo 2.9 when searching duplicates, the duplicates are not displayed next to each other. Imagine you have a set of 500 duplicates, it may become time consuming to select the ones to delete.
Now in Piwigo 2.10, the batch manager shows the duplicates next to each other, based on duplicates criteria. Easy to compare, select and remove.
SmartPocket theme is now compatible with Android 9
We know Android 10 was announced a few days ago, but even the previous version Android 9 is not running on many devices these days. The mobile theme, SmartPocket, was not correctly loaded with Android 9. This is fixed in Piwigo 2.10.
Talking about SmartPocket... even if Modus, Piwigo 2.10's new default theme, is responsive, we are keeping SmartPocket activated by default. It means it will be used automatically if Piwigo detects the visitor is using a mobile device. You can deactivate SmartPocket if you prefer to always use Modus.
1 click to set sub-albums public
From the album edition page, tab "permissions", you could already set the sub-albums private. Now it’s also possible to set them public.
Show album dates
Again, not a new feature but we’ve made it simpler to activate. Piwigo can display the dates of the photos associated to the album. Please note that all themes will support it. For example, Modus only shows album dates if you disable square thumbnails for albums.
No need to use the local configuration to activate it, a simple click is enough.
In the gallery, the album date period is displayed next to album title.
Hide the newsletter subscribe link
We encourage all Piwigo users to subscribe to Piwigo.org newsletter, but once you are subscribed it’s obviously no longer necessary to show you the subscribe link. With Piwigo 2.10 this link will automatically disappear once you are subscribed. And because we don’t want to bother you with this newsletter if you don’t want it, you can also simply ask to hide this link.
On the Piwigo administration dashboard, at the bottom of the page, you can either subscribe to our newsletter or hide this link.
技术特性
Please note that more detailed documentation is available about Technical changes in Piwigo 2.10. Please read it to make your extensions compatible with Piwigo 2.10.
Compatibility with MySQL 8
MySQL 8 is starting to run on production environments and many users have reported some issues with Piwigo. Indeed, MySQL has added some "reserved keywords", such as groups or rank that are used in Piwigo database column or table names.
Admin actions gets logged
Many actions you perform in the administration are now stored in an activity table in the database. For example if you add/edit/delete a photo/album/tag/user/group or if you login/logout, Piwigo will register who did the action and when. For now, Piwigo just logs this activity. Later we will be able to show it.
Updated library PhpMailer
The PHP library Piwigo uses to send emails, PhpMailer, was updated to be compatible with PHP 7.2 and later.
New triggers
We have added 2 new triggers when tags and groups are deleted:
trigger_notify("delete_tags", $tag_ids);trigger_notify('delete_group', $groupids);
Each theme has it own repository
All themes were removed from the Piwigo core repository, even those included in the Piwigo installation zip archive. Each theme has now its own repository on Github. This way we have a specific bugtracker for each theme. Actually, this is exactly what we’ve done for years with plugins!
API improvements
- new
pwg.images.setMd5sumsets the checksum of photos where it’s missing. - new
pwg.categories.setRankchanges the sort order of an album among its siblings. You can also reorder the whole set of albums at once. - new
pwg.users.favorites.addadds a photo to user favorites. - new
pwg.users.favorites.removeremoves a photo from user favorites. - new
pwg.users.favorites.getListreturns the list of user favorite photos. - updated
pwg.session.loginnow accepts empty password (just like web login form).
Source code headers have been simplified
We have simplified source code headers in all PHP files. Instead of writing a full copyright with years + a summary of GPLv2 license, we just tell readers to open the COPYING file.
Instead of this:
<?php
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// | Piwigo - a PHP based photo gallery |
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// | Copyright(C) 2008-2016 Piwigo Team https://piwigo.org |
// | Copyright(C) 2003-2008 PhpWebGallery Team http://phpwebgallery.net |
// | Copyright(C) 2002-2003 Pierrick LE GALL http://le-gall.net/pierrick |
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// | This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify |
// | it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by |
// | the Free Software Foundation |
// | |
// | This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but |
// | WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of |
// | MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU |
// | General Public License for more details. |
// | |
// | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License |
// | along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software |
// | Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, |
// | USA. |
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+we now have this simplified header:
<?php
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
// | This file is part of Piwigo. |
// | |
// | For copyright and license information, please view the COPYING.txt |
// | file that was distributed with this source code. |
// +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
The main goal was to remove years in these headers, because it required updating all Piwigo PHP files each year, for no specific coding change. The good side effect is that we now have a clean COPYING file with details on copyright with dates and trademark + a LICENSE file with the whole GPLv2 license.