History

In addition to the technical history, you can read a little bit more general history about ExhibitPlus in the projects section.

Version 1.5

April 01, 2007 @ 00:00

Minor release

Watch this space - list of changes still to be completed

Version 1.4

April 01, 2005 @ 00:00

Major release

User features:

New languages added: Portuegese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Czech
Single folder mode is now automatic. This means that albums containing no sub folders are now formatted in a much more intelligent manner
Multilevel index links at the top of pages will not display the name of the root directory. Instead more intelligent logic is used - improving appearance.
It is now possible to select the same header and footer for the entire album, or individual headers and footers in certain sub-folders
The size of folder icons on the index page can now be scaled up or down via the UI.
More EXIF and IPTC fields can now be included
EXIF and IPTC fields can be selectively displayed via the UI
"Debug" EXIF data can now be output on slide pages if desired
35mm focal length correction can be done more accurately by entering camera model data into cameras.properties
Spacing around thumbnails on the index page can be altered via the UI
It is possible to now have all slide layout elements in portrait mode, landscape mode, or automatically selected
An additional UI control allows the display of filename and image number to be suppressed on the slide page
Promotional web buttons can now be added to the output of all pages generated in the album
Multi level navigation links are now available on slide pages as well
Multi level navigation links can be selected or deselected on either index or slide pages via the UI
Alternative image names can be specified. This means you can have a different image title displayed, without altering the filename
A guestbook can be added to each slide page, to allow users to write comments on the images

Technical features:

Completely tableless layout. There are now no tables used anywhere in the skin
If scripting is disabled in the user's browser a small warning icon will be displayed which explains that some features may not work
The UI will disable keyboard shortcuts if the guestbook is selected
All significant chunks of beanshell code were moved to methods in index.bsh and slide.bsh. This allows for an increase in speed and future optimisations.
Some methods have been compiled into java byte code - significant speed increase
Overall speed increase of over 100% from v1.3a to v1.4
AVI files now partially supported - with caveats

Bug fixes:

Date issues fixed - problems relating to the use of different formats and the calculation of folder dates are resolved
Strange hanging text on index pages caused by IE bug is now resolved (work around in place)
Issues pertaining to the use of force image dimensions and using thumbnails for folder icons have now been resolved
"New" icon over folders now displays in the same position in both IE and Mozilla
Fixed memory leak which hindered the generation of large albums. Very little memory is consumed now

Version 1.3

May 01, 2004 @ 00:00

Major release:

Added multi-lingual interface. Included languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Serbian, Swedish
Many internal sections of the skin completely re-written
Now fully "XHTML 1.0 Strict" compliant (previously HTML 4.01 Strict)
Cross browser compatibility vastly improved. Now consistant results across a wide variety of browsers and platforms
Added a "single folder mode" to remove navigation elements when an album contains only a single folder
Thumbnails as folder icons now display in their correct aspect ratio, automatically centered and contain hyperlinks to the folders themselves
Added option to place comments above slides, rather than below
Added option for continuous slideshow mode. Slideshow will repeat in a loop rather than stopping at the end
Slideshow delay can now be configured
"Date added" for folders on index page can now be removed
Removed glow effect (IE only) from slide pages
The size of "minithumbs" on the slide pages can now be configured
Added more fields for the display of EXIF data, now almost all IPTC fields are also displayed (if present)
Preview images available on a style by style basis now from the JAlbum user interface (Preview button)
If "force" option is used for the up button on an index page, and a filename of the same name isn't present in the parent, ../ is used instead - a little friendlier
It is now possible to have folders on an index page listing in multiple columns. This is independant of columns and rows for thumbnail images on the same page.
You can now overrride the default icon set for a given style via the UI
New button sets donated by Metodi Davidovic
All filenames within the skin are now completely lowercase. Might help avoid some issues with Unix/Linux systems
Many other minor changes and bug fixes. See the changelog.txt file inside the skin directory for full details

Version 1.2

December 14, 2003 @ 16:03

Minor release:

Added a small border to the current image in the series of "mini-thumbs" on the slide page
Keyboard shortcuts added, a help icon appears to inform the user about which keys perform shortcut actions
Alternative folder names can now be entered via meta.properties
Comments for images can now be entered via comments.properties (JAlbum 4.0 and above feature), or via individual text files with the same name as the image file
Intergration with shutterfly.com's print service. Users may now order printed copies of images to be posted to them
A new tab called "ExhibitPlus" will appear in the JAlbum user interface. Options for the skin can now be set there, making it much easier to use. The variable names may still be changed as before on the "Advanced" tab
Slide images can be watermarked via watermark text that can directly entered on this new configuration tab
Four new styles added - black, light, blue and green. Thanks to my brother Robert for helping out with buttons
Style sheets have now been split into two. One main style sheet governs layout, and one much smaller stylesheet allows colours to be changed quickly. This makes the task of producing alternative stylesheets much simpler!
All internal HTML tags have been converted to lower case. This should make eventual conversion to XHTML much easier
The option to place an additional message after the thumbnails prompting the user to go to the next index page has been removed. Instead a much nicer button appears below the frame on the right hand side if multiple index pages exist
The old countfiles routine was replaced with engine.countfiles. This should eliminate the occassional bug where files were counted three times for the totals
All user variables are now correctly typed (boolean, float, etc.), prompting a rewrite of many of the conditional statements (thanks David). Execution is now marginally faster
Display of EXIF data can now be supressed, or appear as a pop-up box over the image
When viewing slide images, the image number and total number of images within the folder are displayed to make it a little easier for users to know how many slide images they still have to look at
Added an option for a new "Polaroid" mode. The frame around a slide image extends the lower section to look like a "Polariod" picture
A variable is now available to influence the size of the frame which surrounds each slide image
Made some internal changes to the way files are copied to the res folder. This allows a style sheet to potentially contain the name of a button set to be used with a given file, and just the required buttons are copied over when the skin is executed.
Various sizes and styles of buttons are now available under the "button-sets" folder. With some style sheet editing, some mix-and-match of styles and buttons is now possible

Version 1.1

November 3, 2003

Maintenance release:

JAlbum 4.0 had a new "Generator" META tag which caused HTML4.01 compliance to fail. A work around has been put in place to resolve this. Pages now validate correctly
Some minor changes were made to now correctly display thumbnails by using the inline formatting context with default settings (no fixed table mode, no thumbnail descriptions, no thumbnail filenames displayed on index page). This improves the "flow" when different sized thumbnails occur.

Version 1.0

October 31, 2003

Initial public version:

Complete rollup of all previous features and options
Complete rewrite of most skin internals and all HTML code
Conversion from previously unreleased version of skin
Removal of site-specific hard-coded features and transition to fully generic skin
Removed earlier transition effect. Nice IE feature but not CSS compliant. Also incompatible with glow effect - also not CSS compliant :-)
Changes too numerous to mention

Version 0.1

June, 2003

Initial version:

Initial version originally based on Exhibit skin published by David Ekholm. Original author unknown.
"borrowing" of a few features from other skins
Development of a dark colour scheme, including rework of all graphic files for this purpose
This version never published - too heavily customised for fyvie.net