This information is intended for owners of PHP scripts of the WebAsyst Photos application. If you have an account in WebAsyst online services, an update will be performed automatically and will not require your participation.
Installing update
- The update should be installed using WebAsyst Installer as usually: either automatically (recommended), or manually.
On some web hosting servers the root index.php file may be not rewritable. Before installing the update apply chmod 775 (or other similar value if 775 is not allowed, e.g. 777 or 755) to that file. If you fail to proceed as recommended here, you may receive an installation failure message – in this case change access rights for file index.php and restart the updating routine.
- With the update installed, log in to your WebAsyst Photos account. In this moment meta data in the WebAsyst database will be updated.
- The new version of WebAsyst Photos has received new features that become available if you assign your account users appropriate access to them. Access rights can be changed in account section "Users". Access rights options that have been added are "Can modify public gallery design", "Can manage albums".
- If you had WebAsyst Shop-Script installed with SEO-friendly URLs enabled before you updated WebAsyst Photos, perform additional setup of the SEO-friendly URLs for the photo gallery as described below in section "Setting up SEO-friendly URLs for the public photo gallery".
- At this point the update of WebAsyst Photos shall be completed.
Known issues
Slow performance after the update
The main conceptual change introduced in the new version is the thumbnails generation and storage mechanism. In older versions both original images and their thumbnails were stored in a subdirectory inside /data which was protected from direct HTTP access.
In the new version original images remain in the /data directory and thumbnails have been moved to /published/publicdata. Moving all thumbnails to the new directory during the update is impossible due to web server limitations, therefore this process takes place during normal operation of WebAsyst Photos: thumbnails are created upon request, when they are needed. Thumbnails are created from the original photos with the maximum image dimension which is quite often 1024 pixels.
For the reason explained above the following should be taken into account:
- viewing photos in an album (inside the account backend), opening a link or a widget (gallery, slideshow) — all such actions will initiate re-generation of thumbnails for the requested photos which may cause slowdowns in the application performance (from 1 to several seconds depending on your server capacity). Once a thumbnail has been created, further requests will not require its re-generation so it will be promptly displayed in a browser;
- for thumbnails which have not been re-generated yet, export to blogs and forums will not work until re-generation is completed.
The process of thumbnails re-generation is fully automated.
Setting up SEO-friendly URLs for the public photo gallery
If you had WebAsyst Shop-Script installed with SEO-friendly URLs enabled before you updated WebAsyst Photos, obligatory setup for the SEO-friendly URLs of the publicly accessible photo gallery to work correctly is required:
- If you had manually added custom directives to the .htaccess file in the root WebAsyst directory, copy them to file /published/wbsadmin/html/configs/.htaccess.user. If this file does not exist, create it. This step is required to protect your custom directives from deletion should file .htaccess be updated.
Important note: Automatically generated contents of file .htaccess should not be copied to /published/wbsadmin/html/configs/.htaccess.user, only the strings that you had added manually to .htaccess should be saved in that file! If you never added anything to file .htaccess, skip this step.
- Open WebAsyst Installer section "Settings -> Frontend Settings", select the required option in area "Reconfigure main WebAsyst URL" or leave the currently selected option enabled and click on "Save". Clicking on the button will update the contents of the root .htaccess file by adding necessary directives to it for the SEO-friendly URLs of the publicly accessible photo gallery of WebAsyst Photos to work correctly. The photo gallery is always available at a URL of the form http://WEBASYST_INSTALLATION_URL/photos/ where the URL you have WebAsyst installed at should be used instead of WEBASYST_INSTALLATION_URL, e.g., http://domain.com/photos/.
Links and widgets & design features
We have improved visual presentation of links and widgets (except for the slideshow) that were available in older versions of WebAsyst Photos. In particular, we have removed the gradient background with the WebAsyst logo at the page top. After the software update the look of your links and widgets will be automatically updated, too.
Besides we have added an option allowing to edit CSS style rules of the published photo gallery. The same styles are also applied to links (they are not applied to widgets Gallery and Slideshow).
"Add to slideshow" feature of the slideshow widget is deprecated. Widget allows only viewing a slideshow, uploading images to the slideshow is not available anymore.
Transparent WebAsyst logo has been added to the bottom-right corner of every slideshow widget.
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