Release note / Piwigo 12.0.0

A major update, focused on design and user experience, once more.

12.0.0
Download Piwigo 12.0.0

Released on November 4th, 2021

md5sum

Shorter, Stronger, Lighter, Faster

piwigo 11 banner
Download Piwigo 12.0.0

Released on November 4th, 2021

md5sum

Version 12 comes much faster than version 11. We have decided to bring less changes but on shorter release cycle. Less changes but still strong changes. In the continuous effort of the last years, we're still focusing on the administration panel. And we're not finished yet! We still have many improvements in preparation for the future. Rewritten user manager, redesigned plugin manager, added activity viewer are some obvious changes you will see right away. Less visible, we have implemented a new mechanism, the lounge, to make your big galleries much lighter to load.

Grab a coffee and enjoy your read.

The menu

User managerredesign

Complete rewrite of the user manager: more modern and colorful, cleaner, better user experience with easy filtering and dedicated selection mode.

The user manager was rewritten from scratch. Users can't be edited and selected at the same time, you are either in the edit mode or in the selection mode. The "guest" user has been removed from the list and gets a dedicated button. Advanced filters were added.

When set in selection mode, you can apply the same action to several users at once.

The user edition box was also redesigned.

Plugin managerredesign

The plugin manager already received a facelift with Piwigo 11, but we decided to make it evolve again for this version 12.

1) Until now, activated and deactivated plugins were displayed separately. Now they're all displayed together, and can be filtered.

2) In previous versions, When you activated a plugin, the screen reloaded, and you had to search in the list for the newly activated plugin, in order to access its settings. Not practical at all, especially with many plugins.

With Piwigo 12, a single click on a switch activates the plugin. No more page reload. Life changer! Well... maybe not your "whole" life but a least your life when you manage your plugins!

My name is Enora and I've been lucky enough to join the Piwigo Team during my UI/UX design studies. I have been working on new designs for Piwigo administration in version 12. My main priority was to make it more user friendly.

I have used my learnings and upgraded them thanks to advices from the Team. I wanted to refresh user interfaces by trying to adapt them for each type of users.

Users activity lognew

A new screen appears in Piwigo 12: the User Activity Log. It allows you to see the actions performed in the Piwigo administration, by each user: add / delete / modify an album, a photo, a group… You can filter this list for each administrator.

You can even export these activities to a CSV file that can be opened with any spreadsheet software (Excel, Libre Office…).

Sort albumsnew

A new "move" button goes from the album manager to the album mover.

Maintenancerefresh

Maintenance page design was refreshed and now provides more details about cache size and the ability to refresh it (before purge).

Maintenance now displays the list of active plugins.

My name is Louis and I started my work at Piwigo in October 2020 for studies in computer sciences. I have started by fixing problems on version 11 during the beta-testing period.

Then I worked on changes for version 12: integration of pages prepared by designers. I have especially worked on the new generation of the user manager. Editor's note: the new user manager will then be completed by Matthieu, who will get his own focus in Piwigo 13!

Alternate viewsnew

Actually added in version 11.4, let's introduced this new feature properly! We have received many feedbacks concerning the "tile" view of the album manager in Piwigo 11. Many unhappy messages. We have decided to offer alternate views on the album manager, plugin manager and the new user manager.

Technical features

Please note that more detailed documentation is available about Technical changes in Piwigo 12. Please read it to make your extensions compatible with Piwigo 12.

PHP 7 required, PHP 8 compatible

Piwigo 11 was the last version compatible with PHP 5. Piwigo 12 now requires PHP 7.0. We have also made it compatible with PHP 8.

Lounge

New background mechanism, the “lounge“, to bufferize photos during upload. This will avoid too many user cache rebuilds. To make it more understandable: the server load will be much lower on large galleries during photo upload. When saying "large galleries" we mean 100,000 photos and more.

Updated libraries

Mainly to become compatible with PHP 8, we have updated some libraries used in Piwigo core: Smarty 3.1.39, PHPMailer 6.5.1, JShrink 1.4.0.

API changes

  • newpwg.activity.downloadLog
  • newpwg.activity.getList
  • newpwg.categories.calculateOrphans
  • newpwg.getCacheSize
  • newpwg.images.emptyLounge
  • newpwg.images.uploadCompleted