RSGallery2


The RSGallery2 team is pleased to announce the release of RSGallery2 3.2.0 for Joomla 2.5.x and RSGallery2 2.3.0 for Joomla 1.5.x. These are security releases, users are advised to upgrade immediately.
A special thank you goes to Stergios Kolios (ster [dot] kolios [at] gmail [dot] com) who reported the security issues and was so kind to offer his help and expertise.
= Description =
RSGallery2 is a full featured, easy to use, highly customisable, gallery component for Joomla!
Users can upload their images via frontend and backend, via single file upload, batch upload or ftp upload. Galleries containing images can have as many (nested) subgalleries as you want. Galleries and images can be moved around easily. Three graphics libraries, used to make display and thumbnail images, are supported: GD2, ImageMagick and Netpbm. Images can have a watermark. Images can be regenerated after the settings for display image size and thumbnail image size are changed. The site administrator can set permissions for usergroups to be allowed to upload images, create galleries, edit, delete, (un)publish both images and galleries, vote and comment on images, just like the permissions for Joomla core components are set. View access for galleries can be set by the site administrator just like view acces for Joomla Categories. The look and feel can be customised by creating your own RSGallery2 templates.
RSGallery2 has been around since the Mambo days and was originally developed by Ronald Smit. Since then, RSGallery2 has evolved into what it is nowadays.
Support/discussions: www.rsgallery2.nl!
RSGallery2 has always been a free extension and will always be a free extension! We're all volunteers!
= Upgrade instructions =
Create a full backup of your files and database, as always before making changes to your site.
Note: upgrade will automatically overwrite all RSGallery2 system files, but it will leave your images untouched. So if you made any changes to the templates that are shipped with RSGallery2 they will be overwritten! You either have to backup the template or redo any custom changes after upgrading. Also, the comments in the database will be converted from BBCode format to HTML format.
On Joomla 2.5
Go to the Backend > Extensions > Install/Uninstall > Browse… (find the downloaded file) > Click Upload File & Install
On Joomla 1.5
Go to Joomla's Backend > Extensions > Install/Uninstall > Browse to package file... > Upload File & Install
= Instructions for new installation of RSGallery2 =
Create a full backup of your files and database, as always before making changes to your site.
On Joomla 2.5:
Backend > Extensions > Extension Manager > Browse... > Upload File & Install
On Joomla 1.5:
Backend > Extensions > Install/Uninstall > Browse to package file... > Upload File & Install
= Changes 3.2.0 and 2.3.0 =
See the "Changes" on the JoomlaCode download pages.
My only trouble are the templates: the only that I can use are "micromacro" and "supersimple", but they are too "minimal" for me.
I wuold like the voting system,the comments and the gallery divided in different pages!!!
Is it possibile to have different templates?
What should I repair to make the other templates function correctly?
Thanak you.
The default Semantic template has voting and commenting. If you have problems using it please post on the forums at http://rsgallery2.net/
But there is one BIG trouble using RSGallery2. It stores all the images from your galleries into ONE directory. There are directories thumb, original and display for the versions of images but still the only one directory for all images throughtout all your galleries.
Anyhow I wish to use the RSGallery2 for it's great functionality I must leave it outside until its storage is better organized.
But I decided to give it another try and wow, I'm impressed! Very professional and feature rich. It's not too complicated (I'm looking at you Gallery2) and it integrates seamlessly into Joomla and becomes part of your site. I did have to use a nightly build version to rid this release of some of the bugs but it works great!
Hats off to the developers and I'm sure with the skills you've demonstrated so far, RS Gallery is only going to get better and better in the future!
On your forums, I've read nothing but blaming other people, like developers of all those SEF components, for not updating their extension list with one for RSGallery.. This could really be a big problem for this component.
Also, the developers of this component are also responsible for keeping their content elements files (for JoomFish), the same reason as above..
Oh yes, I almost forgotten another very important thing. While I was trying to somehow develop the SEF extension for myself (since no extensions found on the internet were good enough for me) I've realized you are using $catid and $limitstart variables (altogether with page=inline) to display a singe image. Is this really necessairy? For example, you could use only $id (like for download link) and from that $id you can do a single SELECT statement and retrieve those $limitstart and $catid from the #__rsgallery2_files table..
And what is gained using id in URL instead of catid, limitstart, and page? Well, if you think about it a bit, you'll see that your links for displaying a certain image, remain the same no matter if user changes ordering of image in a gallery, or if the user moves the image in another gallery. That way you will be able to get the sef extensions written by other people in your email inbox, to save your time, but this way, there is no way to create good SEF links if your links to a certain image change a lot, depending on the user actions on that image..
I'm not thrilled that the pics are all stored in one massive directory. As other b4 has said, if a user drops, removing their pics is an admin nightmare. Next I've encountered problems uploading pics. It's not that I've reached any maximum number of allowable pics or anything, and I can see the pic in the "monster" pic directory, it just wont show in the gallery or anywhere in the component. Of course the component is in alpha so some of these things may yet be worked out.
All-in-all its worth a closer look.
After researching the many gallery components available for Joomla, I decided on RSgallery because it had the features I was looking for and had many positive reviews.
I just installed it this morning and am still working on creating my new galleries, but WOW. This is so much better than Zoom - I am really pleased. The interface is much easier to work with and it just looks so much nicer than Zoom (and I haven't even touched the CSS yet...really only a few tweaks here and there) I love the option of having different templates and I tried them all, but it seems the default tables template will work best for my site anyway.
I highly recommend this component for anyone needing a basic, clean image gallery. As someone noted on another comment, be sure to go to the config panel before you start uploading images. I also changed my thumbnail size to 100 (from the default 80 - too small, I think) and full size to 500 - I'm not sure how changing those numbers after uploading images would work, so do it first.
You get an excellent rating. Thanks!
The steps are: install RSGallery2, install com_joomlalib and then install RS2gallery bridge component.
After that, configure it and add a component menu item to your site. It took me a whole day to find these steps...:-(
Overall, I recommend it!
But I wish there is an easier way to upload pics to the gallery. Or perhaps an option to move the images from other folders.
On the other hand, my RSGallery versions never seemed to align well in the general category display, and better inline documentation for the numerous display options would have been helpful.
There's also the question of display. Some of the newer Joomla Extensions allow for a nice automatic display of all images in a folder, in a content item - eliminating the need for file-uploading, labelling, etc.
However, if your goal is to have more interactivity (comments, ratings and other features) RSGallery2 accomplishes this well.
Pretty good component - just make sure you are using the right one.
There is a bulk upload facility that none of the others have. When uploading a single pic you can set all the information you like including captions and descriptions.
Displaying your galleries is as easy as putting a menu link to the component - nothing else needed even for adding new galleries which is perfect for a 14 year old. No fiddling about with content pages and mosimages
The control panel for this component is outstanding and as straight forward and easy to understand as the Joomla control panel.
It will even watermark your pictures with a copyright notice of your choice!
For those with big sites with many users you can limit the number of galleries and the number of photos each user can have.
Although I usually avoid Alpha products like the plague I am really glad I haven't done so this time.
An excellent rating doesn't even come close to describing how good this component is.
perfect for the smaller to mid-size sites or joomla/website newbies like myself. I spent all day trying to configure the myriad other galleries available. Wished I hadn't.
Thanks!
Chris
Yes I did have some problems, due a fixed Joomla template, where photographs were displayed all over the browser window. But the support forum came up trumps, and it now works brilliantly. I am very pleased with how the gallery works.
I also had the uploading problems shown in other reviews with earlier versions of RSGallery2.
In the versions I am using, 1.12.2 and 1.13.1, seem very fast, and I have not come across any bugs or other problems yet.
No problems uploading or displaying, very, very happy indeed.
Aside from the already-documented issues using the FTP “upload” routine (frequent PHP memory issues when processing large photos) and the fact that the photos are all stored in one bin (you’ll need to name your photos well to have any home of subsequent management), the fatal flaw we’ve discovered, unfortunately in production, is that the program can’t deliver photos properly under high load situations.
When more than one user tries to view photo close-ups in the gallery within the same fraction of a second, the application cannot determine the difference between users, and serves back the same photo to all of them. In practice, what this means is that users click thumbnail A in album X, but are served close-up B in gallery Y – because someone else online had clicked thumbnail B within the same second.
Also, the on-the-fly watermarking routine breaks down under load, and delivers distorted photos. It has to be disabled when traffic is high.
These problems won’t bother you if you have a low-traffic site, but we unfortunately had 500 visitors to a customer’s site within an hour, and that was enough to find out the hard way that this isn’t a long-term solution.
The FTP upload routine works fine, but PHP must be configured to allow the length of processing needed.
I'm sorry to hear about your high traffic problems. This is related exclusively to the watermarking routine which is not meant for production use. With watermarking turned off you would have been fine.






