RocketTheme Blog

For the past few months we’ve been hard at work on a radical new gallery extension that will be debuted next month for Joomla 1.5 and 1.6. RokGallery is a ground-up revolutionary extension that will over time grow to be hugely flexible and customizable.

The system itself is built on a custom tag-based architecture with the ability to have multiple tag-based galleries. RokGallery uses design and concepts that have been traditionally reserved for platform-native applications and are for the first time making their way into a web environment. For example, you will not have to resize images, or make thumbs before using them in RokGallery, just upload the raw image and use the RokGallery slice editor to resize and crop the images. This non-destructive editing method allows you to create and edit your image size, cropped view, etc, at any point without having to reupload or recreate your image in external photo editing software.

Other features include an all-new multi-file image upload mechanism that incorporates the latest HTML5 drag-and-drop upload functionality, but can also fall back to Flash if your browser doesn’t yet support this feature. Compound filtering can be used to isolate specific images you are looking for and a sophisticated Jobs Manager handles processes like image resizing in the background so you can get on with your work without having to wait for time-consuming image computations to complete.

Here’s a quick non-exhaustive list of RokGallery features:

Administration:

• HTML5/Flash multi-file uploader with upload status indicators
• Multiple image ‘slices’ per image with individual zoom/crop sizes
• Custom tag-based architecture
• Interactive multi-selection via selection drag, or “shift” clicking multiple images
• Advanced compound filtering for selecting specific images
• Multiple Gallery support associated by tag
• Ajax-powered for speed optimization
• CSS3 animation effects for that desktop application feel
• Sophisticated slice editor for creating custom views of a particular image file

Frontend:

• Gallery view component with various view options: 3x3, 4x4, Details etc.
• Override-able architecture to allow for custom layouts including custom HTML, CSS, JS, etc.
• Front-end selectable sort options
• Ability to “love” an image
• Image view counter
• Details view for a particular image with full image information
• Modules available include: Grid view and new Slideshow module with unique transition effects.

We have grand plans for RokGallery, and features we have slated for future releases include:

• Saving filter sets for pre-defined filter groups
• Supporting EXIF data that is defined in the original image file
• Adding images directly into articles
• Auto color palette detection of uploaded image
• Integrated Joomla module positions within the front-end views
• Commenting capability of images (either via 3rd party comments or built-in)
• Custom fields for images such as License and Usage details
• ACL support

To give you a little taste of how RokGallery is coming along, we’ve provided some screenshots (not final!) of it in action: