XGallery for Joomla 2.5

XGallery for Joomla 2.5 has now reached beta and should be ready to be made available in the next week or two. There's been a lot of changes in this version. Categories are now created using com_category instead of being managed by XGallery. Site owners will now add categories to their menu just like any other component category so this mean the Mod XGallery Menu will go away.

File uploader has been replaced and is now using plupload. I like this uploader a lot more because of it's image sizing capabilities and drag and drop capabilities for browsers that support this. I replaced the thumbnail selector with Joomla's media component viewer. For site owners wishing to store their images outside of document root, you will need to manually specify your collection location or purchase a plugin I created that will modify media's location to point to outside of document root. The template themes have been changed and will take better advantage of Joomla's template system. As a last minute thought I added Cache-Control to images that can be enabled or disabled. There was a lot of code cleanup as this component was pretty much written from scratch. As for a Pro version, I'm still deciding how I'm going to create this. I don't really want to keep two code bases. I'm also thinking about adding the ability to get certain features from the Pro version into the Free version for people that just need certain features, like Facebook comments and other social media options. I think this will make it easier to maintain and these plugins will be designed to work on both XGallery and XMovie. I just finished up my wife's website, maesworld.com, which uses the new J2.5 XGallery component and I have to say I'm pretty happy with the results. This gave me the chance to test and improve this component on a site that is now live and all of the customization is done through template overrides. Once I've submitted XGallery to the JED team, I will be turning my attention back to XMovie to make further modifications and updates.