Mauvesoft Gallery

One of my old online friends, Twisted, messaged me this morning to say that he was having problems with his installation of Mauvesoft Gallery. He had reinstalled in on a new Ubuntu box but it was not thumbnailing properly: first it was not generating thumbnails; then, having fixed that, he found that it was not caching them.

Anyway, I tarballed up my unstable development version, 1.5, which adds a few features and fixes a few bugs.

Changelog

• Feature: PHP-based templates
• Feature: Watermarking of thumbnails
• Feature: Images now support EXIF captions and titles
• Theme: New theme 'corporate'
• Theme: 'slides' rewritten in XHTML and CSS
• Bug: Thumbnail transparent PNGs with GD
• Bug: .JPG extensions not considered images
• Bug: Directory names containing '+' character
• Bug: Imagemagick engine doesn't work with CMYK JPEGs

He installed that and after a few permissions bugs, it's up and running.

I suppose this makes it almost ready for an RC. The first alpha is already running on a site I did a couple of months ago for a client, Photography2you.

When I actually package this for release I'm going to use shar, which I am fairly confident I can use to configure the installation after it has unpacked. All webapps suffer from this installation problem, and there doesn't seem to be a generic solution for installing them, even though there is a very limited range of things that need to be configured to get them off the ground on a single-vhost basis. I can't imagine that it would be hard to write a package manager for them. Mauvesoft Gallery works on Windows and even IIS too I believe (although I've not tested it recently), but Windows is much more lax on the permissions (although I've not tried Server 2003), so a normal ZIP file may suffice.

It also occurs to me that as part of this shell-based installer I could offer the user the option to scan their $HOME and symlink any directory it find containing photos (for some definition of photo... perhaps JPEG image over 1 Megapixel?) into the Albums root. Zero-configuration installs here we come. The goal is to make Mauvesoft Gallery simpler to install and use than any other gallery software.