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Improvements to image uploading are coming!

As part of my plans to refocus on improving the existing features of Pixaria Gallery, I'm revisiting the entire image upload and import system for Pixaria. The current system evolved fairly quickly over the course of two years with lots of additions happening in rapid succession and unfortunately, these have made it a little more complicated than I would like in some areas.

One of the most frequent comments I get is that people would like faster ways of getting images into the library with as few steps as possible. Thanks to some great developments in web technologies over the last year or two, this is now much easier a goal to reach than it was when I first started work on Pixaria so tackling this is a top priority.

The situation at the moment is that I'm working on an experimental uploader powered by Adobe Flash. This will make uploading and importing simpler by having the entire process happen on one page and all the current steps that have to be done manually will all be handled automatically in the background.

They way I envisage it working at the moment is something like this:

1. User goes to upload page.
2. User can select multiple files at the same time.
3. User hits the 'upload' button.
4. Without reloading the page, the images are:
   • Uploaded (with progress shown as this happens).
   • Resized on the server.
   • Image metadata is extracted.
   • Images are imported into the library.
   • A list of the uploaded files and any errors is shown.
5. The user can add the images to a gallery or create a new one.

As I said, this is still a bit of a work in progress but, I've been able to get something simple working quite quickly which means I should be able to add it to a live release fairly soon.

Pixaria Development Roadmap

Over the last few weeks, I've paused work on Pixaria 3 to tie up the loose ends on a few projects, something I've been meaning to do now for some time now. In the process of doing this, I've had a good long think about the direction development of Pixaria should go and what my priorities are for adding new features, improving the existing software and deciding how often releases are delivered.

For the first time, I've decided to publish an overview of my thoughts on this in the form of a roadmap, not just for Pixaria Gallery but for Divestock.com too.

Phase I - The Pixaria website

Redesigning the Pixaria website is something I've wanted to do for a while and I've finally started on it. By looking through reports on Google Analytics, I found that a lot of useful information isn't being seen and that some of the most popular pages (demo website and features) aren't as effective as they could be in providing useful information.

The current website also has a few, more arcane issues such as duplicated content, people having problems finding the documentation and a general lack of awareness of tools like the version history and file change logs. To address all these points, I've pretty much completed work on a new website which should launch in a few weeks and which I hope everyone will find significantly easier to use.

At the same time, I'm also going to move the Pixaria forums from the bloated PHPBB software they currently use to the much leaner BBPress which comes from creators of WordPress. Unfortunately, I may not be able to bring over posts and user accounts from the old forums but they will remain visible for browsing.

Phase II - Divestock.com

I'm ashamed to say that I've completely neglected Divestock.com since I launched it and as a result it never really fulfilled its purpose which was to promote Pixaria Gallery user's images.

To rectify this, I'm planning to re-launch the website in a much simpler form featuring full integration with Pixaria 2.5. I'm not going to go into all the details of how this will work at the moment but the intention is to have something up and running by mid April.

Phase III - Pixaria Gallery

Pixaria Gallery is now a mature software application with lots of useful features but as I develop it entirely on my own, I have to be careful to work on it in a way that I can manage without over-stretching myself. With that in mind, I recently spent some time looking at what my goals are not just for this release but for versions beyond that, taking stock of feedback I've had over the last year and making some big decisions that will affect the direction of development over the next few years.

The first important decision is that after soliciting points of view in the forums, Pixaria 3.0 will require PHP 5 or above. By dropping support for PHP 4, I'll be able to start replacing the internals of Pixaria with code that's easier to maintain and enhance. A major benefit of this is that, hopefully new features will be able to come more rapidly.

As I add new features, I have to be careful to avoid Pixaria becoming bloated or hard to use so my second decision is that I'm going to take a leap of faith and cut back on new features for the first release of Pixaria 3.0. Instead, the key goals of this release will be:

1. Simpler library management from uploading images right through to creating galleries.
2. A completely redesigned admin area that's easier to navigate and cuts down on the number of steps needed to complete tasks.
3. A new front end theme with simpler CSS and a cleaner design.
4. Full backwards compatibility with existing themes.

Because I'm not going to make Pixaria 3.0 a 'loads of new features' release, my third big decision is that it will be a free upgrade for all current users of Pixaria 2. It's my intention to follow version 3 fairly quickly with a smaller update which will add more in the way of new features and I will probably charge an upgrade fee for that instead.

I strongly believe that, this roadmap for the next 18 months is good news for everyone and will help to make Pixaria Gallery a better product with a stronger community of successful users. Let me know your thoughts by e-mail info@pixaria.com.

SitePoint Bushfire Relief Sale

As I'm sure many people have heard, devastating bushfires are continuing to rage out of control in Victoria, Australia and are still claiming lives and property. SitePoint who are based in Melbourne, near the affected area, are supporting those caught up in this disaster with a five for one offer on PDF books where 100% of the proceeds will go to victims of the recent fires.

Many of their books are directly relevant to Pixaria users including 'The Principles of Beautiful Web Design' and the Photoshop and PHP Anthologies and at $29.95 USD for five, it's hard to argue with the price. You can read more and pick your five books here.

Proposal to make Pixaria 3 PHP 5 only

I'm considering making the next major version of Pixaria ( ver 3.0) a PHP 5 only release in order to make use of some of its extraordinarily useful advanced capabilities which are missing in PHP 4.

I will have to make a decision on this in the next two weeks or so and it would be a big help if anyone who thinks this is a bad idea could let me know with their thoughts on it.

You can find out your version of PHP from within the Pixaria software diagnostics screen in the admin area or by creating a PHP script with this line of code in it:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Please post any comments about this proposal in the forum.