Zoph 0.9.8

Zoph v0.9.7 was mostly a massive change to the core of Zoph. Inevitably that lead to a few bugs. There were a few more than I hoped and expected, but fortunately none of them very serious. This release fixes all currently known bugs. It also contains a significant change to the way I manage the documentation.

I have moved all Zoph's documentation to Github. About 12 years ago, Zoph's documentation was hand-crafted HTML that was an ordeal to keep updated. I moved it to Wikibooks so I could update the docs through their webinterface. Nowadays, Github offers 'markdown' which is a text format that is both readable in plain text and can be rendered to a more pleasing look on the website. I was already keeping some documentation in this format and it caused a lot of extra work, because I was essentially maintaining two sets of documentation. So, as of this release, all documentation is back in one place: Zoph's repository on Github

Full changelog can be found here

Zoph 0.9.7

I have had a very busy year and little time to spend on Zoph, but last december, I finally found time to finish what I had originally planned for 0.9.6: a complete rewrite of the search screen and the search engine. Most of the code in that part of Zoph was over 10 years old and had become quite messy over the years. The search engine is really the core of Zoph: if you open an album in Zoph, under the hood, Zoph really executes a search for all the photos in that album. This makes this code really important and I've made sure to cover all this by automated tests (UnitTests) before making any changes.

Besides that a few minor bugs were fixed.

Zoph 0.9.6

Zoph 0.9.6 is a release that contains mostly bugfixes.

Shortly after the release I received several reports about SQL-errors I could not reproduce on my system. After investigating, it turned out the a change in MySQL 5.7.4 caused troubles, not only for Zoph, but many other Open Source projects had similar issues. Since the change had only been made in Oracle's MySQL and not in the MariaDB fork, that I am using. It took quite some effort to locate all the places in Zoph that were violating MySQL's "new rules" and to fix the problems. @Raysir has been an invaluable help in testing the changes and pointing out more problems that needed fixes. Since Zoph was not the only project facing these problems, MySQL has reverted most of the changes in question as of MySQL 5.7.8. Since the changes were actually improvements notwithstanding the fact that they are not really needed anymore, I am not reverting them.

@Pontusfroding has found and fixed several other bugs. Big thanks to him for that!

Because of the time it took to fix the bugs,I decided against releasing an interim bugfix release, but just release this in the normal release schedule. Of course this means that the changed originally planned for 0.9.6 have now shifted to 0.9.7.

Bugs

• issue#86 Fixed an omission in the upgrade instructions for 0.9.5
• issue#87 error about class not found on add or edit
• issue#88 Changes for MySQL 5.7 compatibility
  • Give timestamp a default value
  • Add field needed for MySQL 5.7 compatibility with SELECT DISTNCT .. ORDER BY
  • Adding "ORDER BY" fields to autocover query
  • More changes for MySQL 5.7 compatibility
  • Updated SQL scripts
  • Removed unused field from the database
• issue#91 Changed PHPUnit classes to namespaced class naming
• Fixed an issue in a UnitTest that caused a failed test
• Pull Request#94 Add namespace to template showJSwarning in edit_person (by Pontus Fröding)
• Pull Request#95 Add template namespace on two more places. (by Pontus Fröding)
• issue#92 Fixed database connection to utf-8
• issue#93 Pull Request#95 Fix for "Class pager not found" when using pagesets (by Pontus Fröding)

Refactor

• Some modifications to backtrace printing, for easier debugging
• Moved album view into template
• issue#89 Changed look of next and previous buttons on photo page and increased size of actionlinks
• Small style change

Zoph 0.9.5

Zoph 0.9.5

4 feb 2017

Zoph 0.9.5 is the new stable release. It is recommended for everyone to upgrade to this release

Features

• Issue#68 Changed from Mapstraction to Leaflet as mapping abstraction - with GoogleMaps, OpenStreetMap and MapBox (OpenStreetMap) support
  The code for this was based on code provided by Jason (@JiCiT)
• Issue#80 You can now edit permissions from the album screen, without the need to go to the group edit.
• Issue#82 Zoph now gives a proper error message if a photo can not be found

Bugs

• Fixed a bug where in some cases it was possible for an admin to unintentionally delete albums

Refactor

• Lots of internal changes to move to an MVC-architecture
• Several more parts of Zoph moved into templates
• Added more unittests - to automatically test Zoph

Zoph 0.9.4

Due to holidays a little later than the planned 10 week release interval, but nevertheless I'm proud to present the next release of Zoph: v0.9.4.
Zoph 0.9.4 is the new stable release. It is recommended for everyone to upgrade to this release.
The following changes have been made in this release:

Features

• Geocoding: Zoph now also searches Wikipedia
• Issue#67 Changed the colour scheme definition to use a nice interface to select the colour
• Issue#23 An admin user can now define default prefences for new users
• Issue#24 Added an option to automatically propagate permissions to newly created albums
• Issue#78 Removed Yahoo, Cloudmade mapping as they no longer offer their services to the public
• Issue#78 Removed Openlayers mapping, as Zophs implementation was buggy and did not work anymore.
• Issue#47 Photos can now be deleted from disk (moved to a trash dir)
• Issue#67 Added some new colour schemes

Bugs

• Fixed an issue with album pulldown when editing group access rights
• Fixed an issue where the circles page would sometimes report $title not found
• Fixed an issue with changing views on circle page
• Fixed an issue that caused errors in Firefox when using the configuration page
• fixed collapsable details for time and rating
• Issue#78 Fixed a case where an admin user was sometimes not allowed to see a person or a place

Other improvements

• Issue#77 Lots of fixes in the German translation by Thomas Weiland (@HonkXL)
• Moved group display to template
• Moved group delete (confirm) into template
• Moved group edit to a template
• Issue#79 Modify recursive creation of directories, so Zoph can function in an open_basedir enverironment.
• Issue#66 Cleanup of CSS
• Some modernization of the looks of Zoph
• Issue#85 Modified import process to show clearer error message
• Issue#66 Added a reset CSS
• Issue#81 Documentation updates
• Some fixes for UnitTests
• Additional tests
• Refactor of group_permissions class into permissions class
• Refactor prefs class
• Moved preferences page to template
• Modified prefs template to use labels instead of definition lists

Zoph 0.9.3

Much faster than you might have expected, I have released v0.9.3. The previous release took over 2 years to create and I decided to change the way I work on Zoph a little bit. I used to create a long list of changes I would like to incorporate in Zoph and finish all of them before releasing. I now work with a time schedule of about two months and finish whatever I can in that time frame, then take about 2 weeks for some extra quality control and release after that. This should result in a release interval of about 10 weeks.

Zoph 0.9.3 is the new stable release. It is recommended for everyone to upgrade to this release
Despite the relative short period of time since the previous release, quite a number of changes have been made to Zoph:

Features

• Issue #72 Zoph now has a new logon screen.
  The logon screen has background photos. Two of them are already included in Zoph. You can place your own backgrounds in templates/default/images/backgrounds. Or, you can (on the config screen) define an album from which the images will be used as background images. Zoph will display a random image as background.
• Issue #76 The logon screen now gives a message about the username and/or password being wrong instead of just returning to the same screen
• Issue #75 Zoph now uses PHP's password hashing algorithm instead of MySQL's.
  This includes a random 'salt' added to each password. This will make it much, much harder to decrypt your passwords, if your database would ever fall into the wrong hands. The old hashes will be updated with the new ones as soon the the user logs in. Zoph will continue to support the old password hashes at least until v0.9.5.
• Issue #26 It is now possible to define the cookie expirement time. In previous versions of Zoph, a user would be logged out when closing the browser. Is now possible to extend the time to 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 1 week or 1 month. This means a user will not need to re-login for that period of time, even when the browser is closed in the mean time. This can be very convenient, but it could mean that a user leaves Zoph logged in on a public PC. Therefore, the default is still 'session', which means a user will be logged out when closing the browser.
• It is now possible to give a user "can see all photos" access rights. This means you can give a user access to all photos, without giving him/her admin rights and without having to update user rights whenever an album is added.
• Issue #22 It is now possible to allow a user to create albums, categories, people, circles and places. The user automatically has access rights to place photos in the albums, categories, people, circles and places he or she has created.
• Issue #21 It is now possible to allow a user to delete photos. The user will have to have "write" access to at least one album a photo is in.

Bugs

• Issue #73 Fixed sharing feature
• Issue #74 Fixed Canadian English, Dutch and German translation files

For a full overview of the changes see the changelog.

Zoph 0.9.2

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 [ @JiCiT ] 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 Git Repository or in the Wikibooks documentation. Current users of Zoph can use the upgrade instructions.