Imagefield Gallery 2.0 Alpha

Well, yesterday officially marked the first alpha release of imagefield_gallery 2.0.  This is a signficant upgrade in terms of administration UI, and I've got some new features in the pipe for this one as well.  Unfortunately I made the mistake of leaving out some css/js files for the first alpha release and I've been fighting with CVS a bit to try to fix the issue.  I'm hoping my most recent release will handle this problem.

New Stuff:
The Administration was 2 different pages, these pages gave a user access to ALL of the different administration details for content type settings and css settings.  Unfortunately, this system gave users a few too many options, and as such, it made for a less usable interface.  The new interface has been streamlined into one main page, and from there there are individual sub-pages that allow users to alter eligable content types, and update their css settings.  Along with that comes some "at-a-glance" details about your content types, the fields they're using and what your css settings are with out actually navigating to the individual pages.  I'm hoping that this will make for a nicer experience over all.  This did however require a couple of extra hooks into the gallery modules, so if you happen to be one of the 2 groups who have told me about galleries you built that hooked into imagefield_gallery, then be aware, you're going to need to do some upgrade.  Additionally a few of the hooks scope have changed, and you may need to take that into consideration (I certainly did).  Also worth mentioning... if you have a gallery that hooks into imagefield gallery... GIVE IT BACK!  The community could certainly use a few more gallery types.

Upcoming Features:
This brings me to my next point which is that I WILL be building a new gallery type for this release.  So by the time we hit beta, I should have 2 gallery types to choose from.  Adding to the list of new features is the long talked about, but never implemented node-reference feature.  I've been talking about this one for a while, and it's finally starting to take shape.  This should allow you to attach imagefield_galleries to nodes with a node reference to nodes with imagefields on them... that's a confusing sentence.  Suffice it to say, you'll be able to have a node type with a node reference widget on it.  And if that widget references nodes with imagefields attached to them, then imagefield gallery can pull those images and display them in a gallery as though the images were attached to a single node.

I'm hoping this proves useful, I have a usecase for it right now, however, the nature of "multi-value" node references is making me a little leery at the moment.   I'm still wondering why it doesn't work the same way free tagging taxonomy works.  But that's not really my issue at the moment, so perhaps a discussion for another day.

Points of interest:
It's also worth noting that I'm considering a move to stop supporting imagefield 1/imagecache 1 with the 2.x release cycle of imagefield_gallery.  This is an effort to keep the world in general moving forward, but also an effort to keep my code as clean/lean/drupaly as possible.  I'm still unsure of my feelings in this regard as it will require all users to be php4+ compatible.  But there are a lot of good reasons to help force people in that direction, so perhaps there's no harm.  I'd really love some feedback on this particular issue.