How do you feel about EE 2 so far?

[Pekka]

I know there are lots of things still missing (like user upload, e-mail features, lightbox), but how do you feel about EE 2 so far? Was it worth waiting for? Are you (still) seeking for something else or are you planning on sticking with it and seeing where it heads to?

[PeterTaylor]

Hi Pekka,

It was well worth the wait.

E-Commerce is the main function I need to work on now.
I will be sticking with EE for the foreseeable future as I have not found anything to match its clean look and feel for the visitor.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Peter

[DavidW]

So far, I'm leaning heavily towards sticking with it and seeing where it heads. There's some further small glitches that I want to track down in metadata handling (I've done a lot of work today towards getting a debuggable jailed Apache / PHP setup on my FreeBSD box - debugging is impossible on my hosting provider as DBG isn't installed in PHP and the server is clustered anyway), but if I can do this, then I'll contribute the patches in the Bugs forum.

Many of these are 'legacy' bugs (that is, bugs that predate EE2), but EE2 is good enough to be worth my time squashing them.



David

[CRJ700Captain]

Love it boss. Great work. I can't wait to see how it improves...

Lee Mills

[neil_r]

I like it and am sticking with it, Mind you I could not find any other product to compete with Ver 1.5 so everything here is a bonus.

I expected the initial bugs but the lure of early adaption bit in :-)

Great work Pekka, you really should start to make some money out of this, it blows Coppermine and the ilk clean out of the water.

N

[::John::]

I'm still watching and waiting. I don't want to convert and then go through the bugs fixes others appear to be having.

[tommykjensen]

Worth the wait and will stick to it.

I will now start to upload more of my photos. I have on purpose waited for EE2 before uploading too many photos.

When I get some more free time from work I will also change my own small code used here http://photo.klein-jensen.dk/ to use the photos in EE2 so I don't have the same photo twice on my website. What I want to do is change the script I use to share photos here in the forums. This script picks exif data from a seperate manually adminstered database and add to th eborder of the photo. I want to change that to pick the information from EE2 database so I don't have to maintain this extra database. Let me know if you would be interested in including something like this in EE2 I will happily share it with you.

[kheops]

Are you (still) seeking for something else or are you planning on sticking with it and seeing where it heads to?

not a chance i'll look after something else :)
this gallery is already so powerful (so was the 1.5)

take care

[DavidW]

When I get some more free time from work I will also change my own small code used here http://photo.klein-jensen.dk/ to use the photos in EE2 so I don't have the same photo twice on my website. What I want to do is change the script I use to share photos here in the forums. This script picks exif data from a seperate manually adminstered database and add to th eborder of the photo. I want to change that to pick the information from EE2 database so I don't have to maintain this extra database. Let me know if you would be interested in including something like this in EE2 I will happily share it with you.
This sounds very worthwhile to me, Tommy, and hopefully Pekka can find a place for such user-contributed features in the EE distribution.

I've just posted here (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=224680) about a project that I'd like to find the time to do within EE for the benefit of everyone - which is handling geocoded photos (where a GPS is used to give position data for a shot). I've posted there some thoughts about how to geocode photos taken on Canon gear, and some thoughts I'd like to run past Pekka on user-contributed enhancements to EE.



David

[iceman]

It's a splendid upgrade to 1.5, not to drastic of a change, yet a logical and impressive improvement in many areas.

[GvdM]

Pekka,

2.0 is great stuff, as was 1.1, 1.2, 1.5. I am going nowhere and thanks for the hard work.

kind regards

[HMetal]

Hi Pekka,

I love EE2 so far. I don't plan on using anything else for my portfolio(s) at present.

Great job!

[pplfilho]

Pekka,

Like I said before, you've done a great job. It was whorthwhile to wait for EE2.
I like the new feature. Now I have to get acquainted to Styles and learn the whole thing, very good!
:cool:

[MikeCaine]

I'm sticking with 1.5 a bit longer before I'll upgrade. I don't have the time to work through bugfixes and I'm also hoping that someone can sort the Safari / CSS problem out.

[Pekka]

I'm sticking with 1.5 a bit longer before I'll upgrade. I don't have the time to work through bugfixes and I'm also hoping that someone can sort the Safari / CSS problem out.

Bugfixes are minor, they do not really change EE 2 - an they are very easy to do (replace files). For security reasons I recommend to upgrade ASAP.
All CSS problems can not be fixed, epsecially if browser might be in fault.

[MikeCaine]

All CSS problems can not be fixed, epsecially if browser might be in fault.

That's a problem for me. If it looks **** in my web browser of choice at home, Safari on my Mac, and it's the only site that I noticed so far that looks that way, then there's little incentive for me to upgrade. I think the other part of my apathy stems from the long time that version 2 has taken to arrive that I'm no longer that fussed about installing it.

I know I may sound really negative, I really don't mean to sound ungrateful, etc., and I think it's an amazing piece of work to produce the best gallery I've seen and tried. I did pay for ver 1.5 and I've donated with each strap I've bought and there's no way I'm leaving the EE project.

[DavidW]

That's a problem for me. If it looks **** in my web browser of choice at home, Safari on my Mac, and it's the only site that I noticed so far that looks that way, then there's little incentive for me to upgrade.
The problem is that there are a variety of browsers that are all broken in their various ways. For example, the problem I reported here (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=223695) is clearly a CSS problem in IE6 that's fixed in the IE7 betas, though I've yet to figure out precisely what's wrong with IE6.


Ideally, EE would work correctly in any browser. However, the slight differences between browsers, especially when it comes to CSS handling, can make developing for the web a nightmare.

My personal belief is that Pekka has gone down the right path by making EE 2 output XHTML 1.0 Strict which passes validation. I am a great supporter of the mantra of be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you generate. EE follows that by generating XHTML 1.0 Strict. In other words, EE is producing valid code to arguably the tightest modern set of HTML rules that exist, and is flagging the output as compliant with those rules. If a browser refuses to render the resulting code correctly, then the blame falls fairly squarely on the browser.

The move to XHTML 1.0 Strict is one of several architectural changes in EE 2 that I think were wise moves. Another is the move to more security-conscious programming practices in the PHP code of EE 2, reflecting the modern scourge of web site defacements, hijackings and guestbook / comment spamming. I believe this is a good reason to upgrade to EE 2 by itself.


The right answer is to figure out what the browser is doing wrong, and report it to the vendor so that the browser can be fixed. Users really do need to demand standards compliance from the browser authors - though I know that many companies are far from responsive to bug reports from individual end-users, and even large corporates often get relatively short shrift.

Be glad that it's not Microsoft who is the vendor in the case of Safari, as many Microsoft products - particularly Office - only seem to receive security fixes post-release, even when obvious functionality errors have crept in. Twice I've had to pay up for increasingly expensive upgrades to a later version of Office just to overcome bugs in Word. Indeed, Microsoft don't always listen to customer opinion either - IE7 on Windows XP looks near certain not to be colour managed, even though there is a perfectly usable colour management system is in the OS, Office 2003 brought colour management to Office and IE7 on Vista may well be colour managed. This sort of petty upselling is annoying; it frustrates me, but by itself it's not going to drive me towards Vista.

Adobe are much better in my opinion, both in fixing bugs and publishing standards (XMP, for example, is an open specification). They're not perfect, though - they still haven't managed a conclusive fix to a problem I've got in InDesign CS2. Though InDesign CS2 4.0.3 started to address this flaw, and 4.0.4 pushed the fix further, I can still create InDesign documents containing placed PDF pages created from Powerpoint using Acrobat 7.0.8 Professional that refuse to print or export to PDF. The only work-round I've found is to use Acrobat to split the PDF into one EPS file per page, and place the EPS files in InDesign.

I believe Apple are as willing as Adobe to fix bugs in 'point' releases, but I'm not a Mac user. Are you on the latest point release of OS X? (This is a problem when browsers are tied to an operating system - it's not always easy, cheap or straightforward to upgrade to the latest build, and you find a variety of older, broken versions, remaining "in the wild" for a long time).


I don't believe Pekka is saying that browser specific code is forbidden in the EE distribution. In any case, I understand that wholesale changes to the XHTML output would be welcome if they don't break standards compliance.

However, it's all but impossible for a lone developer to work round the bugs in even a common set of browsers (say the most current Safari build, IE6 SP2, IE7 latest beta soon to be replaced by IE7 gold which will be pushed via Windows Update as a critical update to Windows XP, Firefox 1.5 latest version, Firefox 2 latest RC). Throw in the mix of sometimes ageing and deprecated browsers that people still insist on using (any version of Mozilla though it is now deprecated in favour of Firefox, slightly older versions of all the browsers I listed) and the problem gets a whole lot more complicated.

Whilst I realise that it's not really a target for EE, Pocket Internet Explorer is a particular nightmare to support. PIE is not only different in each version of Windows Mobile, but it often gets fixes to the rendering engine in each AKU fix pack, as well as being run on hardware with a variety of screen sizes. You can only install PIE together with a complete Windows Mobile build, and you can only install Windows Mobile builds targeted for your specific hardware!

In the specific case of Safari, I'm not sure that Pekka has access to a Mac (his main platform is Windows).


If you can come up with a description of what is wrong and how it may be worked around in Safari (I can't even find a description of a Safari / CSS problem on the forums) then maybe someone can code it in. Reporting any Safari bugs to Apple seems a better long term answer, though.



David

[MikeCaine]

If you can come up with a description of what is wrong and how it may be worked around in Safari (I can't even find a description of a Safari / CSS problem on the forums) then maybe someone can code it in. Reporting any Safari bugs to Apple seems a better long term answer, though.


It was mentioned before, but I' damned if I can find it now.

I don't seem to be able to attach a photo to this post so I've uploaed an example of the problem re ratings to http://www.iomphoto.com/tmp/rating.jpg.

I appreciate what you're saying about standards, etc.

Regards

Mike

[Pekka]

It was mentioned before, but I' damned if I can find it now.

I don't seem to be able to attach a photo to this post so I've uploaed an example of the problem re ratings to http://www.iomphoto.com/tmp/rating.jpg.

I appreciate what you're saying about standards, etc.

Regards

Mike

Only problem that I see there is that ratings graphs are not aligned to the right. That they overlap is normal (but with narrower windows). The ratings content template is /templates/pages/ee_2_default/comments/ratings/default_XHTML_content.php and CSS classes in default_XHTML_css.php in same folder.

If you find a solution to it in Mac, and that solution works with other browsers, too, I'll update default style with it.

You could take the problem into CSS design forums out there, they are full of people who fight with this stuff every day. I'm all for styles that work with all browsers, but I am not for hacks or tweaks which go to great lenghts to make one browser look good. One solution would be to use tables there, and semantically that would be also correct because rating data is tabular data.

Any other Safari problems in default styles?

[JustJerk]

Waiting to upgrade when I have the Time. Did all the fixes for 1.5, so I hope am safe until then. Love EE and still haven't found anything that comes close to it. Would love to see the lightbox feature.

Once again, thanks for all your hard work and time for making the best Gallery software out there.

[xahmol]

For security reasons I recommend to upgrade ASAP.

Pekka, how serious are those security reasons to upgrade? I probably will not find enough time to update my present EE to EE2 any time soon (I am afraid I will only find some time end of December), certainly because I probably also have to re-integrate the style I use (I now use a slightly modified Darker 2 style) with the rest of my website.
So how serious is continuing to run EE1.5 for another two months or so? Any quick fixes available for RC 1.5 for the most serious dangers if needed? As far as I could check I am up to date with all available security fixes/patches/tips available on the RC 1.5 forums.

[Solaria]

I'm new to the forums but not new to EE (just recently became a Canon User).
I've been using EE since it was in it's earlier versions (1.2 I believe), off and on. The first time I downloaded, I had no prior PHP & MySQL experience. Over the course of my trial and errors (and there have been many..) I've actually been able to learn a lot through the evolution of this program. The code writing skills behind it; Pekka's work, simply boggles the mind (Do you have time for photography anymore Pekka?).
I've just recently installed 2.0, and am very pleased thus far with what is in place.
On another section of my website, I do use WordPress as a CMS and "diary"-like Photoblog. Seems like between the two of them, I have everything I could possibly need to cover my web design needs. I've been wondering if there was a way to seamlessly integrate the two but such programming is way out of my league.

Like others, I can't wait to see what comes of this program, and if ever I were to request anything, perhaps maybe a pro version that includes a backend studio program that makes sorting, filing, ordering and archiving, burning slideshows to disk, and more as simple as the click of a button.

I don't think there's anyway one could say "thanks" enough.

[MikeCaine]

I know that I was reluctant to initially upgrade for a while until any issues were worked out, but I did upgrade a while back and have now done another install of EE on another site because I'm convinced that it's the best gallery programme out there.

The new features are excellent, the work flow seems smoother and I'm very happy with it.

There may be some small issues with things working in a different way (gallery order comes to mind) and perhaps some things being missing (direct link text to photo, photo count on page) but I still rate it as the best gallery and I'm hopeful that there will be tweaks and additions as it goes along.

Big thanks to Pekka for an excellent solo effort

[myth337]

Hi Pekka... and everyone else...

I have just spent the last month fighting with a lot of other Gallery setups (which shall remain nameless) and have ended up coming back to EE. I also just went thru an international service provider change, and decided it would be a good time to upgrade and modify the way things looked.. (hence the search for different galleries).

With the 1.5 -> 2.0 -> 2.02 install/upgrade, (had a 1.5->2.0 installed backup, but with a combined database that I didn't want to fight with) I started from scratch with a clean system, and am quite pleased with the results. Taking a few minutes to research the capabilities and features of EE, and then putting some creative thought into it seems to have produced something that I like.

Anyway.. to the points listed in the quote here about Mac and Safari...

So far, there are only two points that I have noticed that don't quite look right with Safari.

In the attached images, you can see what the results are compared to the same page in FireFox. (still on a Mac.. )

The first image is the overlapping of the Rating and Comments, as Pekka mentioned. (makes things a bit difficult to read)

The second image (Safari on the left, FireFox on the right) is from the selection on the gallery index page. The popup selectors are also not aligned correctly, and it causes the horizontal scroll bar to be displayed all the time. (I have resized the window so I could include it in the screenshot... ) (the gallery is in a frame set)

Either way, while I would be pleased to have them fixed, these two small items are minor, and I can live with them for a while.

man.. I just realized this thread was almost a year old!!!

.. Lee

Only problem that I see there is that ratings graphs are not aligned to the right. That they overlap is normal (but with narrower windows). The ratings content template is /templates/pages/ee_2_default/comments/ratings/default_XHTML_content.php and CSS classes in default_XHTML_css.php in same folder.

If you find a solution to it in Mac, and that solution works with other browsers, too, I'll update default style with it.

You could take the problem into CSS design forums out there, they are full of people who fight with this stuff every day. I'm all for styles that work with all browsers, but I am not for hacks or tweaks which go to great lenghts to make one browser look good. One solution would be to use tables there, and semantically that would be also correct because rating data is tabular data.

Any other Safari problems in default styles?

[Ed Rotberg]

I'm having a problem with my Gallery on Safari as well so I came here. It's not a visual display thing, but Safari (Version 3.1.1 (5525.18)) on a Mac Pro won't display individual images. I've tried other folk's EE 2 sites (I'm running version 2.2) and they work without a problem. When I try to look at an individual image, I get the following error:

Safari can’t open the page “http://www.edrotberg.org/gallery/photo.php?photo=1267&exhibition=5&ee_lang=eng”. The error was: “cannot decode raw data” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1015) Please choose Report Bugs to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

It works fine from Firefox.

My site is hosted on an Ubuntu Server and was only built up from scratch a couple of months ago. latest Apache, Php5 and Mysql (at that time).

Any ideas as to what might be causing this? :(

= Ed =

[Ed Rotberg]

Interestingly, it works just fine on my Mac Pro at home running the same version of everything. Looks like it is time to reboot my Mac at the office ;)

= Ed =

Just another note on this whole topic. I had a co-worker at my office try all this on his Mac Pro after I re-booted and still had the problem. He also experienced this problem. Thinking it might be something with our uber-strict firewall, I contacted a friend at Apple and him try my site on his Safari, and he also experienced the problem. At this point he and I both believe that it is indeed a Safari bug (the page displays fine in both IE7 and Firefox).

Now, having said this I visited a few other EE galleries and NONE of them exhibit this problem, soooo, I'm thinking that there must be something wrong with my installation -- again :( It's very odd. I'm running EE 2.02, but maybe I'm missing an update somewhere?? Does anyone have any ideas on how to debug this?

Thanks,

= Ed =

I'm having a problem with my Gallery on Safari as well so I came here. It's not a visual display thing, but Safari (Version 3.1.1 (5525.18)) on a Mac Pro won't display individual images. I've tried other folk's EE 2 sites (I'm running version 2.2) and they work without a problem. When I try to look at an individual image, I get the following error:



It works fine from Firefox.

My site is hosted on an Ubuntu Server and was only built up from scratch a couple of months ago. latest Apache, Php5 and Mysql (at that time).

Any ideas as to what might be causing this? :(

= Ed =

[PrimaPhoto]

Wonderful job Pekka!!!
It is good to be back using EE again!
http://demo.webentia.net/EE2