After months of work and beta testing, I am very proud and happy to finally release SIMGallery 3.0. This upgrade brings SIMGallery to an entirely new level, compared to both itself and other gallery extensions. As mentioned previously:
SIMGallery 3.0 IS THE BEST COMMUNITY-ENABLED GALLERY FOR JOOMLA IN THE WORLD, EVER!
More information after the jump (including details of a 50% discount for SIMGallery Pro)!
Complete details of SIMGallery is available at the docs. As there are simply too many features to describe, I will just talk about the new ones here. Let's go straight into the juicy details.
SIMGallery 3.0 provides several new features and functionality. They are as follow (note that some examples require logging in first):
Album comments
In addition to photo comments, users can now post comments on an albums basis. Example
Watermarking
This has got to be one of the most requested feature ever! SIMGallery finally supports watermarking. There are 3 modes:
- Main photo only (display watermark on the photo displayed when browsing)
- Include thumbnails (a smaller version of the watermark is displayed on all thumbnails)
- Watermark originals (watermark is displayed on fullsize view and downloaded photo as well)
Support for Alpha User Points
SIMGallery 3.0 comes with several plugins for AUP, and is fully integrated with them. There is a plugin for every single action taken. Upload and publish as your please.
Album Sharing / Post to Profile
Album Sharing - Share album with connected friends (sent via private messaging) or email. You can enter friends' names and/or email addresses, and SIMGallery will automatically detect them.
Post to Profile - Available only for JomSocial. Post the album to your activity stream!
Example (scroll down, to the right)
Search / Advanced Search
Another highly requested feature. Users can search for photos by clicking on the Search option on the user tools menu (dropdown with the "+" sign at top right). The advanced search packs some cool features as well! Try it.
Pagination for comments lists
Yeap, pagination is now available for the different comments listing: Comments on all my albums, Comments on photos that I'm tagged in, and Comments on a particular album. Pagination will appear only if there are more than 20 comments.
Album publishing
When a user first create an album, it will not be published. This gives the user a chance to comment, tag and edit the album first. Once everything is ready, the user can then publish the album. Only then will the activity stream be updated, and the relevant people notified (via email and/or private messaging).
Easy caption update
When browsing photos, users can easily update the photo captions with a couple of clicks. Try it by browsing your own photos.
Advanced Profile Pictures management (requires Pro add-on)
The capstone of the Pro add-on package. No other Joomla extension provides such a functionality! Here's the gist of it:
- Users can manage multiple profile pictures and choose from them easily. Example.
- When users make a photo as their profile picture, they can crop it first to their desired size and output. Go to any photo, scroll down, and click "Make Profile Picture".
- Users can create new profile pictures by either taking a photo if they have a webcam (!!!), or uploading an image. Example.
- When viewing user profile pages (JomSocial or Community Builder), mouseover user's avatar and additional controls will appear. Example.
Other Changes
Apart from all the new cool stuff, there are several changes made to the previous SIMGallery:
- More than 80% of the code is enhanced to increase processing speed and provide easy 3rd party extension integration
- Menu item creation show 2 options: Latest Albums and User Dashboard
- TONS and TONS of interface improvements
- Previous and next photos are preloaded. Browsing is now MUCH FASTER!
- Tagging script written from scratch. MUCH FASTER!
- Pagination behavior changed to slide
- Photo uploading now checks if flash blocker is installed on user's browser
- All 3 modules rewritten and are MUCH FASTER!
- ....and more!
If you have taken a look at all the examples, you would've come to one conclusion. That's right, SIMGallery looks and works exactly like Facebook's photo feature - exactly how a community-driven gallery should be! And that's not all! SIMGallery comes with additional features that make it actually BETTER (eg photo grabbing, rating, downloading etc). I hope you'll enjoy using SIMGallery on your social website, as much as I've enjoyed developing it!
Comments
What is the latest version? I can't find a straight answer anywhere.
http://www.simbunch.com/products/versions
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