We have just released the first alpha version of JoomGallery 4.0.0 for Joomla! 4.x and 5.x .

By the end of 2021 JoomGalleryfriends faced a difficult decision: What should happen to the JoomGallery in the future?

With the release of Joomla! 4, a new major version of Joomla! was about to be launched. After many years of development, Joomla! introduced with version 4 a completely new coding architecture, which had been planned for a long time and should lead the Joomla! project into a modern coding standard. However, this implied that JoomGallery should no longer be compatible with this new version.

The JoomGallery exists already since the very beginnings of Joomla! You can clearly see the history of Joomla! and the constantly changing JoomGallery developers in its code. It is a typical picture of a code that has grown organically over many years. Large parts of the code are still as they were programmed in the early years of Joomla! So now we had the choice; Either we adapt the existing code again to make it work under Joomla! 4, or we take the chance to start over and rewrite the component according to the current standards and with the new programming approach of Joomla!
A review of the entire code showed us that the former option would have required an enormous effort as well. Therefore, we decided to take a risk and try to rebuild the JoomGallery from scratch. Thereby we tried to implement the new concepts as good as possible and at the same time create a foundation to be ready for the future plans of the Joomla! core.

After 22 months of development, with a fluctuating team consisting of 4-7 JoomGallery users, we can present you now an alpha version, which may lay the basis for a new JoomGallery era. The first alpha version contains only the basic features of the gallery and does not yet come close to the capabilities of the JoomGallery 3.x. The first stable version of JoomGallery 4 will additionally include a modern frontend design, a migration manager and an interface for the content plugins. We will orient ourselves for that on the ongoing survey.

After the release of the first stable version, we will start to extend the new JoomGallery step by step, depending on the size and thus capacities of the volunteer development team, until we reach at one point the feature set of JoomGallery 3.x. Again, we will orientate ourselves on the results of the survey and thus the wishes of the users.

Download

The alpha version can be downloaded from the following link: Download Alpha 1

So what is this alpha version all about?

The alpha version shows the current state of development of the component on its way to the first stable release. We have reached a development stage that can be installed and operated quite bug free. We would like to share this development state, to give everyone an idea of our development state and how this new version of JoomGallery will look like. In addition, we want to expand the circle of testers to get more feedback from its users and to further refine and optimize the component.

What is this alpha version NOT about?

This is not a stable release. Do not install this version in any case in a productive Joomla! installation. This developer version still contains bugs, which could lead to data loss in the worst case. However, we encourage everyone to test this alpha version and tell us your experiences and detected issues.

Wie kann ich gefundene Fehler melden?

Ideally you create a new Issue in our GitHub Developer-Repository. This ensures that the issue gets checked by one of the developers and will not be forgotten. If you are not familiar with posting on GitHub, you have the possibility to report the issue in our forum. We will occasionally copy your reported issues from the forum to GitHub.

I would like to help you. How?

JoomGallery is a volunteer open source project. We survive and exist through the community, i.e. the users of JoomGallery. Help us to develop the JoomGallery and make it available.
Find out here how you can get involved.