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The Future of Gallerix
It's been more than a year since I released Gallerix. I originally aimed to fill a giant gap in the wonderful world of Drupal. The need for an elegant and simple-to-use photo sharing module was voiced by many, but only make-shift solutions surfaced. Some of these involved the image module, some involved a custom view, and some involved CCK. Some even involved a combination of these. And while they filled the gap somewhat, they really only worked for administrators and people familiar with Drupal, not grandmothers hoping to share some pictures.
Multimage Mutiny
After ignoring CCK Multimage for a long time, I've decided to resuscitate it. The catch? It will reappear as a brand new module, freed from even more requirements. Originally, CCK Multimage was a fork of CCK Slideshow. It aimed to improve the latter on two counts: less requirements, and Safari compatibility (no, I'm not a Mac user). I like to think I achieved both of those goals on some level.
Drupal 6 presents new problems for CCK Multimage. First of all, Imagefield has more requirements that ever, and so does Imagecache. This makes CCK Multimage require many more modules than before. But more importantly, while I believe CCK in general is a great asset to Drupal, it can prove too powerful, and can easily be misused. It doesn't help that there's still no official release, 9 months after Drupal 6 was released. It's not CCK's fault; I understand it's a vastly complex module.
Some Issue Queues Closed
For a while, I've promoted the use of the issue queue for every project of mine, even if they were hosted on Drupal too. The idea was to centralize all my issues, but unfortunately things didn't really work out that way, and some issues are here, and some issues are on drupal.org.
Because giving credit to fixed issues is so important to projects, I've decided to use Drupal's issue tracker exclusively for projects hosted on both sites. That way I can use issue numbers without ambiguity as to what site the issue number applies to.
Remember, this only applies to projects hosted on both sites, as is the case with Gallerix, CCK Multimage, and JSFX. Projects like the Gallerix Widget Engine are only hosted here, and thus retain the issue queue.
Gallerix 6.x
Although porting Drupal 6 has been underway for a while, I've started to work on an official release today. I've had a nightly snapshot up on Drupal.org for a while, but that was a quick port. Right now my biggest concern is ironing out bugs and making the first Drupal 6 release rock solid.
Unfortunately because this site is dependent on the Project modules, it can't serve as a demo site for Gallerix anymore, since Project is only officially available for Drupal 5. As soon as an official release of Project 6.x is made, this site, including Gallerix, will be upgraded to Drupal 6. I have no estimate when that will happen though; who knows when Project 6.x will be released? Could be a year.
Gallerix for Drupal 6
As you may already know, I'm officially done developing Gallerix for Drupal 5.x. If anybody is interest in maintaining the 5.x branch, let me know. It's taken a lot of time to make the switch to Drupal 6, but I feel it's justified. After all, Drupal.org itself is still on 5.x.
Now that Views and CCK are out, it makes more sense to make the switch. Unfortunately this site can't migrate just yet, since it uses the Project module. But expect a working port for Drupal 6.x soon.
Currently I plan on making the first release for 6.x contain no new features. New features will come once I've put out an official release that works. I have a few ideas in mind; these include: grid pagination, Views 2.x integration, even more intuitive management, and many others.
Gallerix 1.2 Decisions
I've been working a lot on Gallerix recently, and I'm really trying to revamp some of the features. And whenever I'm revamping features, I'm faced with certain difficult decisions. Chief among these: Should I aim for simplicity, or power?
One of my long term goals for Gallerix is to make the entire node to picture, and picture to node relationships abstract, that is, an album is simply a grouping of pictures that exist already. This can prove very powerful because you only have to upload pictures once, and "categorize" into albums as you see fit. Unfortunately, for the traditional web user, this could easily get confusing.
