Evento Gallery Extendido 6.0.0

Major Changes​

• Removed support for Google Photos via API. Google shut this down in 2025. You can still use the Google Photos Picker to copy images from Google Photos or use Shared Links to Google Photos albums.
• New promotion engine. You can now create discounts which either apply automatically or are unlocked by a promotion code. A promotion reduces the price by a percentage or by a fixed amount, either on the whole cart or only on selected image types, and it can also cover the shipping costs. Condition rules decide when a promotion is active, from a simple cart value threshold up to composite rules like "the cart contains 5 images of image type A and 1 image of image type B". Promotions can be limited to a period of time and combined or kept exclusive via a priority.
  
  A promotion can carry any number of codes, each with its own redemption limits. That is what makes personalized codes possible: set up the discount once, then paste one code per recipient into the bulk field and give every code a single redemption. The limits of the promotion itself still apply on top as the budget of the whole campaign.
• #1806 New sharing option Send Image by eMail. The existing eMail sharing only puts a link into the mail. The new option sends the image itself, embedded into the mail, so the recipient sees the picture right away and does not have to follow a link. It uses the same image size the download uses: if menu:Event Gallery[Options > Social > Use Original Files] allows the visitor to get the original image, the original goes out, otherwise the largest thumbnail does.
  
  Like every other sharing option you can switch it on globally in menu:Event Gallery[Options > Social] and turn it off per Event. The visitor gets a small form asking for the recipient address, optionally a name, a reply address and a message. It uses the captcha you configured in Joomla, so leave the captcha empty and there is none. Since images can be large, menu:Event Gallery[Options > Social > Maximum Image Size for eMails] defines an upper limit. Larger originals are sent as the largest thumbnail instead, and if even that is too big the visitor is asked to use the download.
  The mail itself is a new email template named Shared Image, so you can change subject and text in menu:Event Gallery[Email Templates] like any other mail. Every sent image shows up in the download log with the type eMail (large image) or eMail (original image).
• #842 The Ajax List distributes its thumbnails on its own. The layout no longer assigns a fixed number of thumbnails to each page. It measures how many fit into a row at the current window width and fills up as many rows as the new option menu:Event Gallery[Options > Event - Ajax List > Maximum height of the thumbnail area] allows. Every page is filled completely, only the last one holds the remainder.
  
  That means a narrow window gets more pages instead of more rows, which keeps the thumbnail area from pushing the main image off the screen on a phone. Resizing the browser window redistributes the thumbnails and rebuilds the paging bar right away, and the image the visitor is looking at stays selected and is followed to its new page.
  The thumbnails are laid out as a proper grid now: the columns line up across all rows, the remaining space is spread evenly between them, and the last row starts on the left instead of being spread across the full width.
  The intro content on the first page is kept. It counts towards the maximum height, so the first page automatically holds fewer thumbnails - which is what the old Number of thumbs on first page option used to do by hand.
  Thumbnails of the Ajax List are cropped to the square the Height of the thumbnails option asks for instead of being squeezed into it. The delivered thumbnail keeps the proportions of the original, so a wide image used to end up visibly distorted - the more so the larger the configured thumbnail size was.
  The main image of the Ajax List got a stage of its own. Its height now follows the width of the gallery and the viewport instead of the aspect ratio of the image inside it. The image is fitted into that stage without being cropped or distorted, and the space a portrait image leaves next to it is filled with a blurred copy of the same image instead of an empty box.
• #1809 New menu item type Event Access. It shows a landing page with a single password field. The visitor enters the password of a password-protected Event and lands directly in that gallery. Photographers can hand out one link plus a password instead of a personal link per customer.
  
  The page never opens an Event the visitor could not see anyway, so unpublished Events and Events restricted to a user group stay out of reach. Should one password belong to several Events, all of them are unlocked and the visitor picks one from a short list.
  The menu item has an Instructions option: a multilingual text which replaces the generic sentence above the password field, so you can tell your customers where their password came from or whom to ask for it. It accepts HTML, so a link to your contact page works too.
  Since this page lets anybody try passwords against every Event of the site, it uses the captcha you configured in Joomla and allows ten wrong passwords per hour. The limit counts per session and per IP address, so dropping the cookies does not reset it. Only a hash of the IP is stored, never the address itself.

Minor Changes​

• #1722 Sorting Events in the Joomla backend takes the ordering asc/desc for moving the Events into the right direction into account. Moving items up/down will now also use your current filter so you can sort items as expected even if there are filtered out Events in between.
• #1704 Improve the layout of the password page for events to make its appeal more modern.
• #1763 Adding Joomla 7 support by removing deprecated code and adjusting to modern coding standards.
• Extended the FAQ with the steps to switch from on-demand rendering to pre-rendered images.
• #1807 Switching between on-demand and pre-rendered images does not require deleting htaccess/webconfig files anymore.
• #1808 The backend is full of tabs for different config options. The last open tab will re-open after hitting the save-button.
• #1810, #1813 The password page of an Event uses the same brute force protection and the same captcha. Until now a wrong password only added a five second delay after ten tries, kept in the session, which a bot could reset by dropping its cookies - and which tied up a PHP process for every attempt. Now the attempts are counted per session and per IP address, and once the budget is used up even the right password is refused for an hour. Both password pages share one budget.
  
  Links which carry the password, like index.php?option=com_eventgallery&view=event&folder=wedding&password=secret, keep working, but they no longer open the gallery straight away. They now land on the password page with the password already filled in, and the visitor submits the form. That one request is the only one which unlocks anything, and it is the one which passes the captcha and the attempt limit.
  Letting a GET request unlock a gallery meant that everything which follows a link - a crawler, the link preview of a chat app, a virus scanner in a mail client - unlocked it too, and that an attacker could try passwords without ever meeting the captcha.
  If your site sits behind a proxy or a CDN, switch menu:System[Global Configuration > Server > Behind Load Balancer] on. Joomla then reads the real visitor address instead of the address of the proxy, which every visitor would otherwise share.
• #1812 The Track my Order page got the same brute force protection. Order numbers are handed out one after the other, so the email address was the only thing somebody had to guess to see the address, the phone number and the download links of an order. Failed lookups are now counted per session and per IP address, ten per hour. The two forms use separate budgets, so guessing order numbers does not lock anybody out of a protected Event.
  
  The tracking links in your order mails are not affected: they carry the right order number and email address, and only failed lookups count.
• #1814 Email templates are rendered under a security policy now. A template may use placeholders, {if}, {foreach} and the usual modifiers like upper, truncate or date_format exactly as before, but it can no longer call a static method of a PHP class, read a file of the server with {include file="…"}, or look at $_SERVER, $_ENV and PHP constants. Editing an email template only asks for the Edit permission of Event Gallery, which is a lot less than a Super User, and without the policy such a template was able to run code on the server. Every shipped template is unaffected. Should a template of yours use one of the blocked constructs it now reports an error instead of rendering.
• #1815 Payments are better verified before an order counts as paid. Stripe now checks that the checkout session really was paid and that it was paid in the amount and the currency of the order, and PayPal checks that the money went to the configured receiver account and matches the amount and currency of the order. A payment which does not match leaves the order waiting for payment and writes the reason into the plugin log, so look there if an order stays unpaid unexpectedly.
  
  The PayPal payment now also carries the order number inside the message PayPal signs, instead of only in the notification address. Payments which were already started before the update still work; they take the old route and say so in the log.
  If you use the deprecated PayPal Adaptive Payments plugin, please read its log after the first payment. PayPal shut that API down, so its notifications could not be tried against a real payment - the plugin now refuses anything it cannot check rather than assuming it was paid. Consider switching to the ordinary PayPal plugin.
• #1811 The token in the download links of an order now comes from the cryptographic random source instead of uniqid(). uniqid() is mostly the current time, which made the tokens of orders placed around the same moment similar enough to be worth guessing. Links which are already out in your customers' mailboxes keep working - only orders placed from this version on get the new token.

Big Fixes​

• #1738 Videos are not displayed in the lightbox if they are inserted with the content plugin in thumbnail mode.
• #1802 Fixes an exception while adding new tags to Events using the batch tool.

Major Changes
• #1554 Refreshed the style of thumbnails. They do now have rounded corners and a slight drop
shadow. That might cause some trouble with your customization. Please double-check and
adjust after installing this release.
• #1555 Reduced the number of generated thumbnails. By default, those sizes are generated now:
160, 320, 512, 720, 1024, 1440, 1600
Bug Fixes
• #1563 Uploading MP4 files was not possible if images are pre-calculated.

v5.4.11

Minor Changes​

• #1553 A new button in the download log section allows to delete the download log.

Bug Fixes​

• #1514 Avoid a PHP warning message is a menu item is not correctly configured.
• #1552 Handle exceptions for download attempts for deleted images.

Spoiler: OTHER CHANGES

v5.4.10

Minor Changes​

• #1509 improved image loading behavior in the lightbox. A source set is now used to load better-fitting image sizes on different devices. This will also increase the zoom ability. Images from Google Photos, pulled in via Shared Pages, will benefit here the most.
• The transition when opening a lightbox from a cropped image has improved and avoids jumping from the cropped image to the large image.

Bug Fixes​

• #1489 fixing exessive logging for handling shared pages from Google Photos. If you want to clean up, check the Joomla /logs folder. You can delete the log files which have a 'com_eventgallery_googlephotossharedpage.log' in them manually if you like.

v5.4.9

Minor Changes​

• #1462 The imagelist layout for Events in the Events-module has a new parameter to control the behavior of the last line in the layout. You can now select if the last row should be stretched over the full width or not.
• #1463 Allow selecting a default Event Type in the components configuration. This setting is used for preselecting the right folder type when creating a new Event.
• Some minor improvements for light/dark mode in the upload, sync database and thumnbail creator.
  
  

  Bug Fixes​

• #1464 some images can contain EXIF-data which will make the upload or reading image metadata fail. This is handled now gracefully.

v5.4.8

Major Changes​

• #1456 Breakpoints are configurable in the component and modules. This will avoid the need for custom CSS to just change the size of thumbnails or the number of items per row. Check the manual for details.

Minor Changes​

• #1455 remove Google Photos Import since it will no longer working after Google changes the API access.

Bug Fixes​

• #1457 under rare conditions an error like <code>MimeType not in in allowed list image/jpeg, image/gif, image/png, image/webp, video/mp4</code> could show up for local images. This is fixed.
• #1458 the content plugin did not output alt-attributes for single images.

v5.4.7

Major Changes​

• #1456 Breakpoints are configurable in the component and modules. This will avoid the need for custom CSS to just change the size of thumbnails or the number of items per row. Check the manual for details.

Minor Changes​

• #1455 remove Google Photos Import since it will no longer working after Google changes the API access.

v5.4.6

Mayor Changes​

• #1451 Adding a CLI extension to migrate from Google Photos to local storage or S3 storage. Check https://www.svenbluege.de/blog/upda...-changes-to-the-google-photos-api-integration for details. Do the change until 25.3.2025!

v5.4.5

Minor Changes​

• #1436 Introducing a new plugin to support the web service API going forward. The first use case is the tracking of image hits. An image hit is counted when the lightbox is opened. This behavior can be disabled in the components options and applies only to local and S3 images.
• #1437 Adding better support for dark mode by fixing the CSS classes for select boxes.
• #1439 The checkout review page now includes an additional checkbox. While it is labeled as a newsletter opt-in by default, you can repurpose it for other uses by simply modifying the localization keys. The selected value is stored with the order for future reference. The default mail template for order confirmation contains this option if the user selects the opt-in switch.
• #1449 restore compatibility with the current state of Joomla 6

v5.4.3

Major Changes​

• #1431 Google Photos will be no longer supported after May 2025 because Google will make their images unaccessible through their API. If you need to migrate, this is a pain. With this version, I added a link on the list of Events which allows you to copy the Event and download all the images to your local webspace.

This is a very alpha feature! Itll download images with a fixed size of 2400px and only to local webspace. You have to trigger this migration for every event and delete/deactivate the old Google Photos-based Event manually.
If you have any requirement to make your life easier, please reach out to me using the ticket system.

Minor Changes​

• #1433 A new button on the Event page in the backend can be used to reset the hit counter for an Event.

Bug Fixes​

• #1432 Avoid overriding the regular fontawesome CSS and uglify other parts of the page.

v5.4.2

Minor Changes​

• #1424 At the Event you can define user groups to allow the download of the original image. That selection is improved to easily see if the global component configuration is used and to allow reverting event-specific settings.
• #1417 The lazy loading of images was improved to avoid too many requests to the server without a need. Images are much lazier than before.
• #1418 The search for orders in the backend will now search for orders having a file or folder with the search term.
• #1419 Allow the order status field to have user-defined colors to improve usability.
• Updated Glide, the JS framework for the slides to the latest version https://github.com/glidejs/glide/releases/tag/v3.7.1
• #1426 Use the X-platform icon instead of the legacy Twitter icon.
• #1429 Update to Fontawesome 6.
• #1430 adding LinkedIn sharing button.

v5.4.0

Major Changes​

• #1393 The upload allows to select if the uploaded image should be resized or not. The components options contain two new settings in the image-tab to enable the resizing by default and to set a size in px.
• #1399 The file upload provides a new option. In combination with the existing Google Photos Accounts, you can select your files from Google Photos albums and upload them to local webspace or AWS S3 buckets.

Minor Changes​

• #1392 The Event Module has now two new configuration fields to override the default sorting of Events

Bug fixes​

• #1390 Fixes the broken pagination in Events in Joomla 5.1.3 and removes unneeded URL parameters from the paging URLs.
• #1395 Paging in categories views did not work if that happened in a sub-category. It jumped back to the parent category.
• #1396 In generated thumbnails, the EXIF information got broken due an outdated library. The update is in place and generated thumbnails contain the right EXIF now
• #1406 In some cases, the Flickr-URLs are not created correctly and therefore not shown in the front end.

Minor changes​

• #1332 remove pixel-based icons in the backend. They had been there for 14 years, the usage of an icon font is more modern.
• #1333 use the lightbox for image is the backend. It is finally possible to click on a thumbnail and see the larger image version in a lightbox.
• #1343 added a fallback for the case a template has the funny idea of replacing data-title with data-bs-title everywhere, even in places it should keep its fingers from. As a result, even in this case, the title will appear in the lightbox again.

Bug fixes​

• #1342 The module for the latest event can show the latest images, too. Now it can do this with different layouts without throwing an exeption.
• #1346 With at least Joomla 5.1 RC2 there was an issue submitting the Event form with a non-english backend.

#1330 updating the documentation for Google Photos

- not known

With Event Gallery 5, I'll drop any Joomla 3 support. Event Gallery 4 will continue supporting Joomla 3, but will get only bug-fixes in emergency cases.

Minor Changes​

• #1158 Allow to limit the maximum size of Flickr images. Right now, it is possible to download the original Flickr image with the download button. The lightbox uses the h-(2048px)-image. Now you can limit the size to the k-(1600px)- or b-(1024px)-image by modifying the config.php-file and create an overload. Please check the manual for details.
• #1161 allow different ITPC-fields for title and description. This change is available via config.php file only.
• #1163 EXIF data: the focal length is now shown with its 35mm equivalent if available. Example for a 1.5x crop camera: 30mm (45mm).

Bug Fixes​

• #1154 Fixes issues with the ISO value in EXIF data written Pentax camera
• #1155 If a password was entered incorrectly, the message should show up as an error message. Before it was the default success message.
• #1156 PHP 8.1 // Remove deprecation warning on list of files in the backend
• PHP 8.1 // removed some deprecation warnings
• #1157 allow changing the folder name if the change includes only changes in upper/lower case spelling
• #1162 Unable to save event descriptions if using the Arc-editor and multiple languages. If not all descriptions are filled, nothing was saved.