First pre-release for v0.9 available

26 Nov 2011 by jeroen

Zoph v0.9 is almost done. Since the v0.8.4 release, I've worked on killing some bugs and dealing with PHP warning messages. The work seems to be done now. Just like with previous stable releases, I am starting with one or more pre-releases, just to make sure the final v0.9 release will be as bug-free as possible. This is the first one.

As from now, I will release a new pre-release every two or three weeks until two or three weeks pass without any reported bugs. Obviously each pre-release will have the previously found bugs resolved. No other changes will be made until the v0.9 release, except for translation updates.

changes

Compared to the v0.8.4 release, a couple of bugs were resolved.  The "share this photo feature", that was introduced in v0.8.4 had some problems. The changes in album, category, location and person selection in v0.8.4 had also caused some bugs, it wasn't possible to remove a photo from an album or category anymore. The newly introduced popup in thumbnail-view didn't always disappear when you'd move your mouse away from the album or category.

Another thing I've been working on throughout the v0.8.x releases, is PHP warning messages. PHP gives warnings about situations that are not an error, but aren't 100% correct either. Zoph was full of them. Fortunately, most default PHP installations are configured to hide them, but every now and then I got a report from someone who was seeing them. When I started the v0.9 development, about 2 years ago, I decided that one of the development goals for v0.9 should be getting rid of them. Throughout the various feature releases I resolved most of them, but a few were still left. They should be all gone now.

There is one  notable exception: the search page. The search page is still full of warnings and the code is, frankly, a mess. I was pretty sure trying to resolve all the warnings would introduce a range of bugs, something I didn't want to do so close to a stable release. In the v0.10 release, I will completely rewrite the search page and the backend search so I will take care of that in the near future.

For more details, see the changelog.

stable / unstable

v0.9pre1 is a beta release, that may have some sharp edges, so if you're looking for a solution that just works, you could probably best stay with the current stable release (v0.8.0.5). (On the other hand, I have been using various stages of development between v0.8.4 and this version on my own photo-album, with little problems but the now resolved bugs.)

If you are willing to help out ironing the last few wrinkles, please consider downloading this version and reporting any problems you find.

documentation

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

download

This release can be downloaded from the Sourceforge file release system: Zoph v0.9pre1.