Zoph 0.9.2 released
It has taken a while. It has been more than two years since the previous Zoph release. But, here it is, the new version of Zoph. v0.9.2. It has taken a lot of work. Literally 1000s of lines of code have been changed, added or deleted.
The most important change was driven by a major change in PHP, the language Zoph is written in. The driver Zoph was using to connect to the database was declared deprecated as of PHP v5.5 and has been removed in PHP v7.0. I could have simply removed the references to the old functions and replaced them by PDO calls, but I decided I wanted to make optimal use of the new driver and wrote a complete new database subsystem and query builder for Zoph. This required changes, literally, all over Zoph. This was a major thread for the stability of Zoph, because many of the database queries only get executed in very specific situations. So, another thing I did, was creating automatic tests (unittests) for Zoph, making sure that every query was being executed and it's results tested, before I changed it to the new database subsystem. As said, a lot of work and the better part of two years to finish this. Of course this is all behind the scenes and should be invisible for you as a user.
Furthermore, I implemented a few changes requested through the issues page on Github:
- Issue #44: Added 'circles': a way to group people in Zoph. This is especially handy if you have a large amount of people in your Zoph, and the 'person' page is becoming confusing or cluttered.
- Issue #46: A circle and it's members can be surpressed in the overview page, so you can, for example, hide people that you added only for a small set of photos.
- Issue #32: It is now possible to set more properties of a photo, including map zoom from the web import.
- Issue #60: The link text for "next" and "previous" as well as page numbers has been increased in size for better usability esp. on mobile devices
Besides these improvements, numerous bugs have been fixed. A full overview can be found in the changelog.
Contrary to previous 0.x.y releases, Zoph 0.9.2 should be considered a stable release. I have decided to drop the separation between stable and unstable or feature releases. This means every user of Zoph is encouraged to upgrade to this version.
Last, but not least, Jason Taylor has recently joined the Zoph development team. In this release, he has helped me testing and fixed several bugs. He also added a few features. I'm sure you will see more contributions by his hand in the next release (which is supposed to come out a lot earlier than 2018...)
If you are a new user of Zoph, you can find requirements and installation instructions in the Wikibooks documentation, where current users of Zoph can find upgrade instructions as well.