Our take on technology, programming and opensource
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. Let me see whom we can follow. You are definitely in the list 
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After months (I must say years) of hard work and adding numerous new features Coppermine Dev Team is pleased to announce the release of an alpha version of our next major series 1.5.x. The alpha release is only meant for testers. This release is in no way meant for production use and should only be used on your testbeds.
If you want to help us by testing cpg 1.5.1 then please read our forum thread, cpg1.5.1 alpha: how to become a tester, to figure out if you can apply for tester group membership.
There is absolutely no support for cpg1.5.x at this stage and no support requests will be entertained in the forums. However testers are encouraged to report bugs in the forums (1.5.x bugs board is restricted to testers and developers only).
Non-testers i.e. normal users of coppermine – stay tuned and look forward for a wonderful package coming up in the next few months.
One of the most common task I perform before uploading photos in my coppermine gallery is resizing all pictures to a more internet friendly size.
Over the period of time I have found ImageMagick to be very useful when it comes to manipulating images. Below are the commands commonly used for resizing images.
To resize all images in current directory to 800 width (height will be reduced proportionately) :
mogrify -resize 800 *.jpg
Resize all images to 800 height (width will be reduced proportionately)
mogrify -resize x800 *.jpg
Resize all images to a maximum dimension of 800×800. This means that max of width and height will be considered while resizing :
mogrify -resize 800×800 *.jpg
Reduce the size of images to the percent of original :
mogrify -resize 75% *.jpg
Note that in all above commands the original file will be replaced with the new one. Also the examples given above uses only jpg files but you can surely do it with other image formats as well.
Its a great pleasure to inform you all that we have moved our site and all subdomains to a dedicated server sponsored and hosted by Bytemark. The transfer was smooth without any outages and our ever busy forum was up all the time.
You will find the forum pages loading faster than earlier as the new server has more resources which we couldn’t manage on our old shared hosting environment. However, we are highly obliged for the services provided by our old host Power-Netz for the past numerous years.
We would like to thank Matthew Bloch and his team from Bytemark for their generous offer and services. We look forward to a wonder webhosting experience.
I came across with this quote today and instantly thought of coppermine forums.
Never argue with an idiot. They pull you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
There is no dearth of such morons on coppermine forums.
Recently I have seen many users criticizing support team of being rude and un-friendly. They claim that we should answer their each and every question (which we do unless the question has already been asked many times) as they are using our product. What they don’t understand is that coppermine is not a commercial product but a FREE open source application which comes with no warranty for support. Despite of this we try to help as much as possible and reply to more than 95% of threads.
Threads started by such morons lead to flames and arguments and they generally beat us with their experience.
Continuing the series to highlight the new exciting features of cpg15x, today lets take a look at all new upload interface. The new interface uses the popular open source tool SwfUpload which uses flash to upload files. The great thing about this tool is that it shows file upload progress bar. Whats better than a demo itself, so here you go…
As you can see multiple files can be selected and uploaded in one single go. After uploading the user is taken to editpics page where s/he can enter the file details like title, description and keywords. The only gotcha with this new interface is that it requires flash and javascript but in todays time if your browser don’t have those two things then you are still living in 20th century .
Well i am late on this but nevertheless – Coppermine Dev Team wishes all users of cpg a very Happy New Year 2009. We look forward to having a rocking time in 2009.
This new year will also bring the new coppermine release i.e. cpg1.5.x (lets keep our fingers crossed). We are working hard to make this possible. However no release date has been set so please don’t ask about the date in comments. You all have kept enough patience and as the saying goes “Patience is the virtue of wise men” fits quite well here.
Fasten your seat belts and get ready for a rocking year ahead.
The next major release of coppermine i.e. cpg1.5 will have number of new features which all of you will most definitely adore however In this post I have highlighted only a few of them.
1. User album in admin allowed categories
This was one long standing feature awaiting to get its way into coppermine. From 15x onwards registered users will be able to create albums in the public categories. From the category manager page admin will be able to specify which group of users can create albums in that category.
The best thing about this feature is that coppermine will now be more social networking friendly. Previously users were only allowed to create albums in their personal gallery and those albums were not visible on home page and this made the user confined to his/her personal gallery only. Now any category can be public which means the albums in those categories will come from different users.
2. Permanent URLs for search engine friendliness
When coppermine first started SEO term was not even coined. In today’s world a site cannot survive without SEO friendly URLs. Till now the URLs in coppermine were based on position of the pic in an album. The biggest drawback of this approach was that a position of pic keeps changing in an album as new pics are added to that album. This used to hamper the search engine indexing and also a lot of times people coming from the search engines used to land on a different pic than they anticipated.
This issue was solved by replacing pos with pid (permanent id of pic) in the URLs. Since the pid will never change for a given pic – the URLs remain absolute.
3. Comments approval and captcha
Well, comment spam needs no introduction. The captcha plugin and mod were one of the most used plugins/mods in our forums. Looking at this we decided to put captcha in the core code. The only gotcha in captcha is that it will work only on those servers which have GD 2.x with freetype support. We are working hard to find alternative but for now this is the only option.
A second layer of security will be comments approval. If turned on – each comment will require admin approval before they start appearing to the world.
This was only the tip of iceburg. Stay tuned for more cool features.
Coppermine Dev Team welcomes you to this blog. For those who have absolutely no idea what Coppermine is, here is an excerpt from our home page.
Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.
Coppermine is free software which you can download and install on your webspace.
Coppermine (cpg) was originally created by Gregory Demar and the current team took over the development in the year 2003. We are a bunch of volunteers spread across the globe determined to make cpg a better experience for users.
The authors of this blog will be all members of cpg development team which includes managers, core developers and supporters. As the team members are from different cultures you will find different styles of writing which i hope you all will enjoy.
We started this blog to put forward our experience, knowledge and views on technology, programming and opensource. This blog will highlight coppermine project, its development and features. But hold on, this blog will not be entirely about coppermine and will have topics including php, other opensource applications, world wide web, anything related to technology and sometimes developers and their life.
Now pardon me for changing my tone but i would like to make one thing very very clear – this blog is not meant for coppermine support. There is a better place for getting support and that is our forum. So don’t be a moron by putting support issues in comments. However general comments on blog posts are more than welcome.
I hope everyone will enjoy our writings.
Abbas Ali
