Zoph 0.8.4 released

Today, exactly 2 years after v0.8, I have posted a new Zoph release to the Sourceforge site. Version 0.8.4 is the fourth and last prerelease for v0.9. No more new features will be added to v0.9. This version features many small improvements compared to the 0.8.3 release from april this year. Several features have been added to the new CLI client, that was introduced in v0.8.1 and everal usability improvements have been made.

New features

A popup has been added to the thumbnail view of albums, categories, places and people that will show you some information about what is in that album.

A 'share this photo' feature has been added, that will allow you to (selectively) share photo's with other users without logging in to Zoph.

The 'edit photo' and 'bulk edit photo' now automatically add a new dropdown menu whenever you add an album, category or person, similar to the way the webimport already did this since v0.8.1. The 'people slots' feature that implemented a part of this functionality for people only, but was less flexible, has been removed.

CLI Client

The zophImport.pl CLI client was replaced by zoph in v0.8.1. This release adds new functionality to the zoph CLI client. You can now add albums, categories, persons and places from the commandline, manually with the --new CLI option or automatically with --autoadd.

Zoph now supports recursive import: instead of giving a long list of files, you can import a whole directory. With --dirpattern you can even have Zoph organize photos based on the input directory name.

Performance

The bulk edit page allows you to make changes to many photos at the same time. With many photos, this page now loads over 20 times faster.

The SQL queries that  Zoph used for the 'show tracks' page were slow and not cachable. In v0.8.4, the first time this page is opened, it loads about 10x faster than in v0.8.3, each consequitive time, it's even 50 to 100 times faster, thanks to database caching.

refactoring

As you may know, Zoph has been around for over 10 years. This means that the first lines of code were written in the era of PHP3. I have started to update Zoph's code to be in line with current best practices of PHP programming. This is a process that will continue over the next releases.

documentation and changelog

Documentation is available as a wikibook, which includes information about installing, configuring, using, upgrading and a full changelog.

downloading

You can download Zoph from the Sourceforge page. Keep in mind, however, that this is a beta release. I have tested this version thoroughly and there are no known issues at this time but some rough edges may still be present. If you do not feel comfortable with that, you can download the latest stable release, v0.8.0.5. But, Zoph cannot do without the brave users that test these prereleases, and help me find the last few bugs so v0.9 will be even better.

version 0.9

As mentionned before, this is the last feature release for v0.9, so no new features will be added anymore. Of course any bugs that will be reported will be solved before v0.9. The new features have also added quite a few text labels to Zoph and many of them have not been translated. It would be nice if v0.9 could have a large proportion of the translations up to date. So, if you are more-or-less fluent in one of the incomplete languages, I can use your help. Check the translations page for the 'missing strings'.

support + contact

If you have problems when installing or using Zoph, please post a message to the forum, if you are sure the problem you have is caused by a bug, please report it. You can follow Zoph on Facebook and Twitter.