One of our big goals with Gallery 5 is to restore a level of administrative control that allows different sites to dictate how their users and moderators will interact with the software. Some sites wish to allow their users to have control over their submissions. Some sites wish to control the submissions their members contribute once the file is uploaded. In order to accommodate the myriad of needs our clients have, we have implemented many new controls to IP.Gallery, and reworked how some existing controls function.
Moderators
One change we have made is to remove moderator-style permissions from the group management area and implement a full "Moderators" area of the ACP. When managing your categories in the IP.Gallery ACP, you can now add moderators to one or more categories. These moderators can be groups or individual members. You can specify the following permissions for your moderators:
- Can approve images
- Can approve comments
- Can edit images and albums
- Can hide images
- Can delete images and albums
- Can move images and albums
- Can set cover images
- Can edit comments
- Can delete comments
Members will be allowed to move their own images between their own albums, but will not be able to move images from their albums to another member's albums, or to categories. You can still specify on a per-group basis if members can edit their own images and comments, delete their own images and comments, and you will also now be able to specify whether they can delete their own albums or not. This will allow administrators to control what their members can and cannot do in IP.Gallery.
Controlling Albums
In addition to the aforementioned moderator permission updates, administrators will now have more control over how users manage albums. You can now specify whether members can create public, private and friend-only albums separately (so you can allow members to create all 3 kinds, only public albums, or disallow members to create albums entirely). As with previous versions, you can also limit the number of albums they can create, and the number of images they can upload into each album.
Further to this, however, you can control the defaults for new albums and which of those default options members can override. Under the Album Manager area of the IP.Gallery ACP, there is a new page: Album Defaults. When you visit this page, you will be able to control the album default options and determine which of those options members can change.
To lock or unlock a field from being editable, you simply click on the green or red icon to toggle it. Fields that are locked will still display to users on the front end, but will be disabled and uneditable. This allows users to know what preferences are being enforced.
You will note in the screenshot that there is a message under the watermark field advising that the option is only honored when a category is set to "Allow members to choose per-album". When you create a category that allows album submissions, you can choose one of three options for the watermark preference:
- Do not watermark
- Force watermark on every image
- Allow members to choose per-album
The first two options are self-explanatory. The last option allows members to specify whether they use watermarks or not when creating their own individual albums (and of course can also be restricted by the album default preferences discussed above).
It is important to note as well - you can enable and disable ratings and comments at the category level. If you disable comments or ratings at the category level, this preference cascades down to the albums within the category. If comments are disabled in a category, they are disabled for all albums within that category. If a user does not have permission to comment in a category, they will not have permission to comment within albums contained in that category.
Image Control
Administrators have fairly good control over images in IP.Gallery already, however we are expanding this control in IP.Gallery 5.0. Some new options include:
- Ability to shut off "medium" and "small"-sized images. You cannot shut off the thumbnail or large-sized images, as both are used throughout Gallery in many different places.
- You will be able to shut off cropping of thumbnails.
- Instead of "unapproving" images, you will now "hide" images. These will show up in the Moderator CP when hidden. Members who can delete their own images will actually be "hiding" them, giving moderators a chance to review the deletion before it is carried out completely.
You will of course retain all of the previous image control options available in Gallery 4, and many minor interface changes will make handling your images easier and more intuitive.
Up Next
We realize control of your Gallery installation is important and we are working towards giving administrators sensible options to enable them to configure IP.Gallery to their needs. We have a lot more changes in store and will be discussing some of the more interesting changes in our next blog entry. Stay tuned!