Moa

1.2.4

Well 1.2.4 is out and doing well so far according to Sourceforge/Freshmeat stats.

 I've noticed one minor issue which I will correct tomorrow and put out as 1.2.4a along with updating the demo. The pagination is showing up on galleries that only have sub-galleries if enough images match that galleries tags. It should be a single file to update so will provide a link to that directly as well to save downloading the whole package. Either way it will just be a case of overwriting the old file(s).

A workaround for now would be to edit that gallery and put a tag that isn't used by any images on it and put it in 'tagged' mode.

Cookies

I read an article on BBC news today about a new European law coming in on May 25th that says explicit consent must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via cookies. The law is still being discussed by the web community (at Boagworld for example), especially as it seems rather vague.

Moa uses a single cookie just for the admin logging in and currently won't allow edits without it but it looks like we may be covered just by adding a message to explain this on the admin login page and the documentation. We will put that into the templates for Moa 1.2.5 and see if anyone has made more sense of it by then. For visitors looking at your gallery, no cookies are used by Moa.

If someone wanted to make or modify a template that might embed adverts then of course they can do that, but they would be liable to inform users about any additional cookies that the ads may use.

How this will effect blogs that have adverts I don't know as the page can't always tell if an ad uses cookies or not. It seems incredibly restrictive to force a career blogger to have to mention it on every single page or even provide ad-free versions which may cut their income enough that they can't easily continue blogging. There isn't room in the advert to opt-in on a per-ad basis and that would cut revenue to the bloggers even more as presumably people will rarely opt in.

New template

We have a blue variation of the MoaDefault template which we should start distributing but I don't want to stick it in the main package as hopefully we will have several before long and would prefer them to be separate. I'll look into adding a download page to the site to get it out there. We also have a minimal skeleton template we use for adding new features that people might like to look into if they want to make their own template. that needs cleaning up though and some documentation adding.

One of the things we have planned for the next few releases is a template chooser with a screenshot and meta-info in the hope people might look into making templates as we pick up more users. It will also allow notes for the template as some may work better with different thumbnail sizes, etc. Additionally we will be adding a site name to the options to allow it to show on the template instead of the 'Moa' or 'Aperture' logos currently visible.

If anyone wants to give template making it a try we can help out, even if it is just a photoshop mockup we can build it from.

CMS move

This site is currently using Joomla as a CMS but I have to admit, I don't like it much... It works but that's pretty much as far as it goes. It is far too complicated for what we use it for.

I'm going to investigate if moving to Wordpress would be better as the back-end is a lot nicer to work with. I can get the data transferred over easily enough, just would have to convert (and finish!) the custom template we use.

I was hoping to get 1.2.4 released last weekend and get into the frequent updates again. Thought it was all done and ready to test but spotted a few things to fix/finish so had to hold back, bah!

The main  change is that tags are now optional in your gallery/image organization. New galleries will use 'indexed' mode where images will stick to that gallery no matter what tags are set on either part like any other web gallery. A checkbox on the gallery add/edit form lets you use 'tagged' mode instead which works like classic Moa. We still believe that the tag system or organizing galleries is the more powerful so didn't want to get rid of it completely. I wanted to call the tagged galleries 'live' galleries but Rich pointed out it might mislead people that they were coming from somewhere other than Moa, like from other galleries or Google Image-style.

Adding this way of doing galleries opened up the ability to easily add pagination so we did that too. Internally even tagged galleries now actually use an index, it just gets updated more often than an indexed gallery. Therefore we can just add a LIMIT clause into the query and get any subset of the current gallery. Using indices for all galleries also speeds things up a lot for large galleries as the full tagging query doesn't get run every pageview, only when updating tags.

Indices also open us up to re-arranging images which we should have soon and is needed, but not going to be in 1.2.4. We still need to plan the best way to get it in place which would be usable. Drag and drop would work, but pagination then causes issues. We have an image manager planned for 1.3 which would allow it but we are several releases away from that still. It's something for us to think about though as I do believe it is needed.

Anyway. I've just fixed one of the two remaining problems blocking the 1.2.4 release. Hopefully will get the other sorted in the morning and should be able to test and get it out this weekend.

We've been wondering for a while if the tag/gallery link is unclear to people - It certainly seems so from the people we have watched trying to use Moa. I think it the best thing about Moa personally, but as that is subjective we plan to make a change to help clear up things.

So, for the next release the plan is to have a tickbox on each gallery that toggles between "fixed" and "live" gallery views. "Live" is the current system, tags decide what gallery an image ends up in to make the whole system dynamic. "Fixed" will be the default however, meaning that an image uploaded gets linked to that gallery (like a regular web gallery) and the tag field is then entirely optional. Both live and fixed galleries can be used anywhere and an image uploaded to a fixed gallery will be available for a live gallery to use, assuming it has tags. This will hopefully help people get up to speed with Moa as quickly as possible when they first start, but still allow them to play with the live views later if they want.

The change involved also makes some of our wishlist much easier, including re-ordering images, multi-page galleries, etc.

In other news, this next release (1.2.3) is looking to be a bit of a usability-polish. Currently we are hard at work improving the forms with tooltip help, field checking throughout and some HTML markup improvements. The other two features we want to get in place this time are URL rewriting (SEO-friendly URLs such as www.somesite.com/gallery/Regents_Park/612/trees.jpg) and searching, but those two depend on time.

Do you like it? Let us know in the comments below!

Finally we have the bulk upload code pretty much done and tested the way I mentioned in the previous post.

For the rest of the code there are still a couple of bits to iron out and a few simple extras to add such as path/database validity checks when the page is generated or new config settings applied. I revisited the MoaDefault template and converted it to use rounded corners and drop shadows via CSS3 instead of images as before. This should help it run better in IE6 and keep the amount of data transferred down a bit. It also made it easier to change the colors so I added a blue variant of MoaDefault too.

In other Moa news we have both started working on a new template each to give a bit more variation. We will probably make these available as separate downloads when done to avoid cluttering up the main archive and so you can choose which to get.

If anybody wants to volunteer to make a new template, even a new default one, let us know and we will give help and assistance any way we can. We are programmers not web designers and know full well that we suck when it comes to the arty side . I can be contacted via email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .