A new, and likely final, beta release of CB Gallery 3.0 is now available. This includes many new great features, optimizations, and a few bug fixes along the way. This will likely be the final beta release with next release being stable. Take a look below at what has just arrived!
This release is basically considered production ready, but is still marked Beta due to the lack of migration code and lack of external integrations (e.g. CB Activity cannot utilize CB Gallery 3.0 currently). So if you're launching a new site this is a great starting point.
Article galleries can now be entirely managed from within the article. This is also now the forced default behavior. So their galleries no longer can be managed while viewing the article directly and now require edit permission.
This also lets you override per-article what gallery is used and adjust its positioning. The positioning also supports inline positioning allowing you to use a shortcode to insert the gallery in the article wherever you like. This now provides THE most powerful media gallery available to Joomla for all your articles!
Full gallery AND album downloading has now been implemented. This is default disabled, but when enabled you'll have a new download button when viewing galleries and a download menu item when viewing albums. This will open a clean page indicating that the download is being prepared and once done will initiate the download. This is very handy for sites wanting stronger GDPR export compliance.
Another great new feature is requiring media to have an Album. When enabled the generic Share Media button will not be visible when viewing a gallery and instead will require navigating into an Album first to ensure media is always shared to an Album.
Views tracking has been officially implemented and optimized. Views tracking is available for both Albums and Media. Just like CB Activity this uses basic session checks and localstorage checks to avoid duplicate views, but it should not be used as serious metric for views.
It is now possible to watermark all photos on a per-gallery basis. This allows applying an image on top of the uploaded image in various supported positions.
Lets take a look at what the above would result in below.
Metadata is now officially supported out of the box. So you no longer need to handle this manually. For both Albums and Media the Title, Description, Author, OpenGraph, and X (Twitter) metadata will output automatically. This includes outputting twitter card images AND media players. This even works when you paste a media URL into your own activity stream!
In addition to this media embeds have been implemented. Just like CB Activity this lets you iframe embed media into external sources. This primarily is just used by CB Activity Share integration, but could be used however you like.
Last, but not least is we now officially have a Joomla Smart Search plugin for CB Gallery! This will allow Joomla smart search to index your galleries for lightning fast site wide searching. Do keep in mind this ONLY checks Gallery Access and will not verify any other access permissions so be mindful which galleries you index!
You can directly download this version using the link below or by using the version selection dropdown for the CB Gallery package on our downloads page if you have an active subscription.
Download CB Gallery 3.0.0 Beta 2
Note the CB Gallery Search Bot is currently unbundled as it's not compatible with Joomla 3 so during the Beta it will need to be downloaded separately, but will be bundled in future Stable releases.
Download CB Gallery Search Bot 3.0.0 Beta 2
This is again very likely the final beta release before stable. So this is the best time to get in your final feedback before stable release. Thank you to everyone that has given the beta a try and I very much appreciate your time!