A few things.

A few things. [Tuesday, 08 March 2011 21:51]

Written by Dan Brown

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.

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